Well, today is a day that everyone was expecting, but perhaps not the most exciting day of the month. Today, Intel officially releases the spate of 7-series chipsets for their 3rd generation Core microarchitecture processors (read – Ivy Bridge), despite the actual release of the processors being another three weeks away. This means that today we can actually look at, test, or purchase the range of motherboards that natively support Ivy Bridge. However, we can’t officially publish all the benchmarks for these products using Ivy Bridge until that date three weeks away (to be honest, we are still testing!). So today we are going to have a good in depth look into the Z77 chipset itself, and the review products we have received to let you know what we think looks good. All these boards today will be fully reviewed, warts and all, with Ivy Bridge, as close to official release as possible.
The boards today are from ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS and Biostar. All these boards will natively support Sandy Bridge processors, and be fully upgradeable to Ivy Bridge silicon when the processors are released. Read on for the preview.
Ever since the launch of the Bulldozer range and 9-series motherboards, the initial reviews of the processors were not encouraging to say the least. Since then, AMD has decided to pull out of the enthusiast end of the CPU market, to focus in on the mainstream and low power processors. This is despite the fact that Windows 7 (and Windows 8, natively) is now receiving updates so the operating system can understand the processor architecture a little better, and hopefully boost performance. This gives a second wind to those owning (or thinking of owning) a Bulldozer based processor, and in turn, a 900-series motherboard. With the updates in hand, today we are looking at five 990FX boards that may feature on the consumer or system builders’ radar.
Read on for the full review.
We've known about Cedar Trail for quite a while now, the next iteration of Intel's Atom processor line. As far as the CPU is concerned, not a lot has changed from the previous generation Pine Trail. Cedar Trail is manufactured on Intel's 32nm process technology, but the CPU architecture is still in-order. You can read more of our Cedar Trail coverage in our initial look at the platform. It's taken far longer than expected, but we finally got someone to send us a Cedar Trail netbook for review. That someone is ASUS, and the netbook is their 1025C.
We'll have our full review in the future, but in the meantime we thought we'd give some quick impressions of performance and, more importantly, battery life during video playback. I'll cut straight to the chase with regards to CPU performance: it's largely unchanged from the last version, which means Atom N2600 still feels quite sluggish for many tasks. Atom is faster than ARM A9 CPUs, and you can see a comparison of Sunspider 0.9.1 with various tablets below, but for Windows 7 it's still painfully slow at times.
The bigger change however is in the GPU, where the old GMA 3150 (itself a minor tweak to the even older GMA 950) is finally getting a needed upgrade. This won't turn Atom into a gaming system by any stretch of the imagination, but it does finally bring GPU accelerated H.264 decoding into the Atom ecosystem (without the need for a discrete GPU). What does that mean for performance? It means HD YouTube video can finally run without dropping a ton of frames—at least, the 720p videos that I tested played back without any major issues. 1080p video still experiences quite a few dropped frames, unfortunately, but then you don't need to stream 1080p video if you're using the integrated 600p LCD.
But YouTube HD video has always demanded more than local video playback, and we can now finally get DXVA assisted playback of H.264 video content. I tested both 720p and 1080p H.264 videos without any major issues using MPC-HC. What's more, I ran our standard H.264 battery life test to see how the Atom N2800 fared—and I ran it a second time with a 1080p video stream just for good measure. Check out the results:
Atom and netbooks in general still aren't going to set the world on fire with performance, but if there's one thing Atom can do well it's long battery life. Cedar Trail takes the previous Atom results and improves on them by over 50% in video playback tests. Tablets still generally do better here, but gIven that Cedar Trail now supports HDMI output, you could conceivably use an Atom netbook as a portable media player in addition to standard laptop tasks.
I tested Hulu and Netflix on the 1025C as well and both worked reasonably well, but only with SD content. That's not an issue for Hulu, but Netflix HD content completely lost A/V sync. It may be that Hulu and Netflix are not currenlty recognizing the GMA 3600, but until this is addressed it's worth noting.
There's still a question of whether a 0 netbook has a place in the market when we've got tablets to play with, but it's really a matter of intended use as well as price. ASUS' own Eee Prime Transformer offers a better display and a nifty touch interface that easily surpasses the Windows 7 Starter experience, but if you're looking to do mundane tasks like basic word processing you'll need the keyboard attachment, which takes the final price up to ~0—nearly twice that of the Eee PC 1025C. For basic typing, then, the price of the 1025C makes it a better choice, and you get excellent battery life that will easily carry you through a day of use and then some.
Atom still isn't going to surpass AMD's Brazos for performance or GPU driver quality, but pricing and battery life still appear to be in favor of Intel's Atom, and 10.1" Brazos netbooks are pretty rarefied. We'll have our full review as soon as we can finish running the remaining benchmarks and doing additional testing, which might be a while. Hopefully we'll see equally impressive improvements for Internet and Idle battery life, but it took over ten hours to recharge the battery on the 1025C and eight hours plus for our video playback test, so basically I'm look at a full day for each battery test cycle to complete.
We don't get a lot of projectors for review, but ASUS sent us their P1 Portable LED Projector and so we wanted to do a short write up of the device. It's a small projector primarily intended for portability and business use–something that you could easily carry with you as you travel to meetings so that you know you'll have a viable projector for your presentation. Tipping the scales at less than a pound, there are many projectors where the lens alone is larger than the P1.
So how does the ASUS P1 fare in our short look? While we don't have the necessary equipment to test many aspects of the projector, for the intended purpose it delivers what ASUS has promised. Read on for our thoughts on the device.
Asus Zenbook UX31E
Now we’re talking turkey
With the Asus UX31E, all the fuss about Ultrabooks starts to make sense. Its all-metal chassis, cut from a single sheet of aluminum, is undeniably handsome. And while this attractive metal wedge that’s just .71 inches at its thickest brings to mind the fine craftsmanship of a MacBook Air, it’s by no means a knockoff. The UX31E possesses a unique character that’s admirable in its own right. And at ,050, it’s 0 less than its similarly spec’d Apple counterpart.
Silver inside and out, save for a black bezel around the screen and black backing to the keyboard, the UX31E sports a faintly etched pattern of concentric circles on its lid, while the deck is adorned with a pattern of brushed vertical lines, interrupted only by a spacious clickpad. While clickpads can be persnickety and frustrating to use, we didn’t have any issues with the pad on the UX31E. As for the keyboard, the size and spacing of the keys feels right, and although the key press is shallow, there’s a satisfying click at the end of each depression.
Another welcome feature of the UX31E is its 1600×900 screen resolution, besting the 1366×768 of the other screens in this roundup and the 1440×900 of the 13.3-inch MacBook Air. Like all the others, the UX31E’s screen is glossy; it produces a bright, vivid picture and holds up well off axis.
The two speakers embedded in the chassis are powered by Bang & Olufsen ICEpower tech and put out surprisingly full audio for a device of these dimensions.
Internally, the UX31E also impresses. Its Core i5-2557M proc is clocked at 1.7GHz, with a max Turbo frequency of 2.7GHz. Combine that with a SATA 6Gb/s SSD and you’ve got a machine that posts healthy gains over our zero-point in the benchmarks and some of the fastest scores in this roundup. To put it in perspective, the UX31E had sequential read and write speeds of 463MB/s and 341MB/s, respectively—pretty darn close to the spec’s max bandwidth. Sadly, the SSD is just 128GB.
The UX31E’s battery life surpassed five hours in our tests. It recharged to 50 percent in less than an hour, and reached a full charge in three. Booting to Windows took 23 seconds.
Asus throws in a tasteful, brown padded carrying case for the UX31E, as well as a matching pouch that holds two connector dongles: USB-to-Ethernet and Mini VGA-to-VGA. Yes, Mini VGA is built into the unit (who knew it even existed?), along with Mini HDMI, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, headphone, mic, and a media reader.
All told, the UX31E weighs in at three pounds, 2.1 ounces (or 8.3 ounces, if you add the power supply). If going toe-to-toe with Apple’s Air on both design and specs, while beating its price, is what it takes to achieve product hotness, then Asus has done it.
,050, www.asus.com
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