At 03:36 PM 10/08/2010, Joshua MacCraw wrote:
Like ION HTPC's being made, it kicks ass video wise. Thanks to CUDA certain apps can offload work to the GPU. Doesn't replace my Q6600 desktop by but gives me what I need portable short of serious games. Video is all that matters because even decade old slow PC's are enough CPU power short of engineering, CAD, heavy number crunching, and games so what do you do that makes a fast CPU at the expense of video a worthwhile trade-off?
Switching from my regular laptop to a netbook whilst on the road I found Word Processing and web work to be noticably slower on the netbook. I've since tried out several other netbooks and found the same thing. The idea that old slow PCs are fast enough is a personal assessment, and I hate waiting and I run too many tasks to make an Atom worthwhile. And given how Anand dumps on Atom-based systems' performance, I'm not the only one. Perhaps if I could actually offload some of the work to the GPU it would be fine to go low end CPU/higher end GPU, but I think that's a pretty limited set of apps.
If you're talking $490+200=~$700, I'd rather spend $900-1000 for an ROG laptop w/ highend video card because then I could game with it and know the video power would be good for a few years since it's typically the part you can't upgrade in a portable. Short of that this IS the best deal in it's price range & latops $100-200 more as reviews all over are saying.
I'm thinking small form laptop - otherwise I'd go higher end on all components and go full sized - I'm thinking about size and performance and not cost.
Video matters because I watch MKV's of TV shows & DVD's with my netbook. Otherwise it's just for Internet & doing customer diagnostics/backups onsite. Occasionally I'l play Red Alert 3 type games with it and it's even good for that. Screen size is probably my biggest complaint but it's livable. Nothing I am doing short of maybe taking a bit longer to run 7-Zip relies on CPU enough to want a faster CPU w/ GMA graphics.
On an <=30" screen, it really doesn't matter to me if I'm watching regular or 720 TV shows. If I'm going to watch HD, I'll go 1080p which I can't do on a netbook screen anyway.
So for me, I really can't see the value of a high end video on a netbook. And I've yet to have a GMA video bother me on anything I do.
T
