Sunday, January 2, 2011

Love you Atom :D

Why would you want a sloppy Atom CPU ticking inside your PC in the first place, either you are not too demanding on hardware or you are a road warrior who wants to squeeze every bit of juice from your laptop battery. While I fall in to the later category, I'm not exactly a road warrior. The main reason of getting the Netbook was the skyrocketing electricity bills in Sri Lanka. My main PC consumes at least 70-80W just for idling (G92 GPU alone eats around 30W :-/). Unless I have games to play, most of the time I spend infront of the PC are low demanding tasks such as Net browsing, downloading and watching movies.

So I bought this Lenovo Ideapad S10-3 Netbook, the battery life is rated as 7hours by Lenovo, I usually get 5hours+ when browsing net with the HSDPA modem. RMClock readings show around 8-10W being consumed during net browsing, and the funny thing is watching standard definition movies only taxes 7-8W of battery power. The culprit is the HSDPA modem that eats 2W+ alone under load.



The only thing I'm dissapointed in is the inability to undervolt the Atom CPU, RMClock doesn't detect the CPU properly ,Crystal CPUID voltage setting option doesn't work and the damn thing idles @ 0.95v while the lowest specified voltage being 0.8v >_<. I think I'll have to live with that until they release a supported version of their software. Apart from that the performance is just OK. I love the portability. I can be with my parents and I don't have to be inside my room ,which I always get shouted at :P