Asus Eee PC Full Retail Review Showcase
Performance, Power, and Thermal Profile
A Note On Standard Peformance Metrics:
Unfortunately, our standard set of benchmarks couldn't be tested on the Linux-based Eee PC, since they are built for performance evaluation in Windows environments. Nor would they provide any real, relative reference points either. If you're interested in knowing how "fast" the Eee PC responds to application requests and general processing, we'd offer that the machine had a very snappy feel to it, from its svelte ~15 second boot time to word processing and web surfing. The only aspects of the Eee PC that felt a bit feeble were when we fired up a high definition digital video file or with the Peguin Racer game, both of which require significant graphics processing resources. Clearly the Eee PC isn't geared toward being a gaming machine but you knew that, with its 7" LCD display. Otherwise, it's quite nimble at just about everything else you would use a full-sized notebook for.
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With the available power budget of the Eee PC, which we're sure was classified as "not much" by Asus Engineering management, we fully expected the machine to sip power in very modest amounts. Modest was obviously an understatement...
;)
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Power Consumption and Battery Life | |
| Idle Power | 14.5W - 15.2W (observed) |
| Load Power | 17.2W - 18W (observed) |
| Battery Life | 3 hours 40 minutes (observed) |
We hooked up the Eee PC 701 to our test-bench power analyzer with the system's small power adapter brick plugged into the load socket and the analyzer plugged into a wall outlet power source. The battery was removed from the unit. We wanted to measure exactly how much total power the system drew under idle and load conditions.
As you can see, with roughly 15 Watts draw at idle and 17.5 Watts under load, the design engineers definitely hit that "not much" target square on. Our best efforts to load the system down with Peguin Racer, Open Office Writer and Firefox running all simultaneously, yielded the highest power draw we observed at 18 Watts.
In addition, though Asus lists the battery life of our Eee PC 701 4G model for 3.5 hours, we actually experienced even a bit more life than what the system is technically rated for. Bravo.
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Low power consumption generally means a fairly cool thermal profile as well. So we baked the Eee PC in for a while, with a 3D game running and a bit of web surfing in the background, just to make sure the WiFi NIC was pulling some juice as well.
;)
;)
The two hottest spots on the Eee PC were right underneath the main CPU area on the keyboard and in roughly the same location on the backside of the machine as well. The palm rest area checked in at just under 100ºF on either side of the touch pad with our infrared digital thermometer. In short, the Eee PC is more than comfortable to handle for long periods of time without having to worry about sweaty palm syndrome.
