Acer Aspire One 751h Review

Netbook Performance Comparison

You can read about our testing setup and the other laptops used in our previous GIGABYTE M1022 review. None of the results changed for this article, so we’ll dispense with most of the commentary to keep things short.

The performance picture shows that the Atom Z520/Poulsbo combination is clearly slower than the Atom N280/945GSE platform. How much of the slowdown comes from the 25% lower CPU clock varies by application, and you can see by the 3DMark results that the GMA 500 is anything but a high-performance 3D solution. In fact, in 3D applications the GMA 950 is anywhere from 45% to 75% faster than the GMA 500. Overall performance ends up somewhere between the old ASUS Eee PC 4G and the more recent Eee PC 901, which is still typically “fast enough” for office and Internet use.

One element of performance that’s not immediately visible from the above graphs is the video playback capabilities. All of the other systems are able to handle 720p x264 decoding — albeit barely in the case of the 1005HA and M1022. Those two netbooks require the use of the CoreAVC codec in order to avoid dropping frames. Unfortunately, the Atom Z520 simply isn’t able to decode HD x264 videos without severe stuttering. The good news is that you can use other less strenuous codecs (DivX and Xvid for example), but it’s a shame that the higher resolution LCD is held back by the choice of a lower performance processor. The Poulsbo chipset is supposed to provide HD codec support, but at present it appears application support for the necessary functions is not there.