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

8 comments:

සසඳ said...

wOw... great men... my company is gonna use Netbooks for going forward business needs. but my idea is Atom is not suitable for this... :D

GayanNR said...

aiyo,productivity charter wei :D

yohanxk said...

mata nam netbook ekak oone wena ekak nee... apee Electricity bill eka company eken gewanawa.... :-)

Anusha Dharmasena said...

so what are the latest developments on this?

i hope there aren't any power failures anymore. lol

GayanNR said...

lmao, seriously there weren't any power failures after buying this , buhahaahah

Unknown said...

roflmao

Unknown said...

Now I really wish my laptop had faster CPU. I am watching the world cup matches online from espnplayer.com. The video stutters. It only uses up 50% of CPU, but seems something is single-threaded. I don't think it is flash because when I watch live.twit.tv, the CPU % goes above 50%.

GayanNR said...

Or wish you had a better onboard GPU xD
lol, mine hardly does 480p and above youtube videos, the crappy Intel GMA 3150 doesn't accelerate them, bastards have released a web video acceleration supported Drivers for Atom Z5xx series (PowerVR SGX 535 GPU), which is slower than Atom N series >_<