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Asus Eee 1000H – Too big to be small, yet too small to be big...

We continue our line of netbook tests with Asus’ Eee 1000H, the only Eee 1000 series model that will officially hit Scandinavia. Eee 1000H comes with a 160GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, and Intel’s newest Atom N270 processor.

The product was kindly lent to us by Asus www.asus.com





Specifications

Category:

Internet and student laptop.

Processor:

Intel Atom, N270, 1.6GHz, 512KB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB.

Chipset:

Intel i945GME, 82801GHM ICH7-M/ U Southbridge.

RAM:

1.024MB DDR2, PC5300 RAM, 667MHz, ASint Technology module, 2GB is max according to Asus.

Display adapter:

Intel i945GME, with 8MB DDR2 RAM.

Hard drive:

160GB Hard drive, 2.5" SATA, 8MB cache, 5400RPM 
80GB hard drive, 2.5”, 8 MB cache, 5400RPM.

Display:

10", WSGA TFT, resolution 1024x600.

Sound card & speakers:

Realtek High Definition chipset, 24Bit stereo compatible. Two built-in stereo speakers.

Optical drive:

None, but you can connect an external drive via USB or share a drive via network.

Battery:

6 Cell, 6600mAh.

Networking:

WiFi
Wireless 802.11b/g
Ethernet LAN 10/100
Bluetooth 2.0

Connectivity options:

1x VGA

1x RJ-45 Ethernet

1x Microphone in

1x Headphones out / SPDIF

1x Multi-i-1 card reader, SD, MS, MS Pro, MMC, xD

3x USB

Dimensions:

266(B)x191(D)x28~38(H)mm.
1.44Kg with 6 Cell battery.

Support:

Support is available at http://www.asus.com/

Warranty:

Asus provides a two year warranty.

Operating system:

Windows XP Home Edition.

Software included:

Asus Program package incl. DVD player.
Microsoft Office 2007 60 day trial.

Price:

The recommended retail price of the Eee 1000H is 3,400.00 DKK incl. VAT.

Package contents



I received the Eee 1000H with what can only be described as excitement. Since Asus announced their first Eee, the market for netbooks has simply exploded. 2008 will in many ways be a netbook year, and Eee will definitely be one of the most significant products; the new Eee 1000H is the biggest
on the market at the moment in Denmark.



Let’s have a look at what Asus put in the package besides the laptop.

Included:

- "Charger"

- "Sleeve"

- "Manuals"



The included sleeve is spacious, but I wouldn’t recommend squeezing anything but the Eee into it.

It’s time to take the Eee 1000H out of the sleeve and have a closer look.

Physical aspects

First impression



The Danish model of the Eee 1000H will be cast in black, though I the model I tested was white. The hard drive also deviated from the official, in that it was only 80GB rather than 160GB.



The Eee 1000H is a netbook without any fancy gimmicks, and looks more or less like the earlier models.



What really hits you is the weight. In fact, the battery only makes up for a fourth of the weight, and that’s with a total of over 1.4kg. This means that even some 12.1” subnotes can compete.

The design of the Eee 1000H is simple yet elegant. It seems surprisingly robust, which is impressive for a laptop that costs less than 3,500.00 DKK.

The lid:



Like the rest of the laptop, the lid is made of solid plastic, and the display may flex a tiny bit. The colour is white like the rest, with “Eee” imprinted in the upper corner. Eee was designed by Asus to be a brand in itself, and the products have been expanded from netbooks to displays and mini desktops.

The front:



The front has no other functions than four diodes at the right side.

The rear:



There are no ports at the rear as the 6 Cell battery takes up most of the space.

The bottom:



At the bottom there’s a vent along with access to hard drive and RAM.



A nice aspect of the Eee 1000 series is that they are very easy to upgrade at home. As such, you can upgrade RAM or hard drive in the laptop with ease. That will certainly make many pick the Eee rather than other netbooks.



The battery takes up quite a lot of space on the Eee 1000H.



The battery seems big, and it does add 326 grams to the overall weight of the netbook.
The battery is a 6 Cell, 6600mAh. We test its performance below.

The right side:



From the right, there’s the port for the power supply, then the VGA port, two out of a total of three USB ports, an antennae port not included in the final edition and doesn’t have a hardware function in the tested model, and finally a card reader...



The Eee 1000H comes with a 160GB hard drive, more than enough for normal network use – the hard drive is a 5400rpm hard drive, so there’s lots of performance. Should you need more, you can always expand via flash RAM and USB hard drives.

The left side:



From the left, there’s a slot for a Kensingtion lock, then an RJ-45 Ethernet port. Next, there’s the Eee 1000H’s last USB port, making for a decent total on a netbook of this size. You can never get enough USB ports...Last are the ports for microphone in and headphones out.



The Eee 1000H has lots of possibilities for expansion via the USB ports. Some might miss an HDMI or DVI port, but the picture quality on, for example, a 24” display is quite good via the VGA port. Now some of you are probably asking yourselves, “That’s all very well, but what about my installation media?” The majority of programs anyone would ever need on a netbook can be downloaded, and I installed WOW on the laptop via a shared DVD drive. In other words, you can easily do without an optical drive. Alternatively, there are plenty of slim products on the market that would suit the Eee products just fine.

Diodes and buttons:



At the front, there are four diodes showing the status of the Eee, battery, hard drive, and wireless.



At the right side, there’s a power button.



The buttons at the left side are for more interesting. The first from the left is an on/off button for the display.



The other button from the left adjusts the display’s resolution between 800x600, 1024x600, and 1024x768. The latter is an oversize format that
expands the display beyond the physical size of the screen.



The third button from the left is for Powermode, allowing you to adjust the performance of the Eee 1000H and thereby match your needs for battery optimization versus performance in games and such.

Keyboard and touchpad:



The keyboard has some lovely keys, but you can forget all about full-size. The keys are comfortable to type with though, and somewhat resistant to grimy fingers. The keys make comfortable sounds when you use them, and even I – with my big fingers – got used to typing with them. 





The touchpad works flawlessly and so do the buttons.

Display:



The display is dull and relatively light-strong.



The 10” display has a really large angle of view so you can see what’s on the screen even if you aren’t sitting directly in front of the laptop.





At the top of the display there’s a webcam coupled with no less than two integrated microphones at the bottom of the display. Both work without a hitch, and the built-in webcam is fully functional and delivers a decent picture for a 1.3MP webcam. Netbooks are obvious candidates for video conferences, and the Eee 1000H is recommended in this regard.

Noise, heat, and power usage:



The Eee 1000H uses up 38W at full load, which is impressive and bodes well for the battery’s performance (which we test below).



The power supply is compact.



I mention the power cable included because I’m a little disappointed that Asus only gives half a meter of cable; the Eee 1000H might be a netbook, but the distance to a power outlet is the same...

I would describe the noise level from the Eee 1000H’s coolers as low, even during gaming or running more demanding programs.
It’s time to look at how the insides of the Eee 1000H perform – we examine the performance of the processor, display adapter, RAM, hard drive, and battery in the benchmark section.

Benchmark

Often when we review laptops, we start with a picture of the Windows Vista Experience Index. We don’t do it this time for goods reasons. While the laptop could carry a Vista installation, I wouldn’t recommend it on a machine with just 1 GB RAM.
I have decided to put the Eee 1000H up against another netbook, namely the new Asus Eee 1000HD. It hasn’t been officially released in Denmark, but is available at some retailers.

The Asus Eee 1000HD model had the following specifications:

Processor:

Intel Celeron, M 353, 900MHz, 512KB L2 Cache, 400MHz FSB.

Chipset:

Intel i915GMS Chipset, ICH6-M Southbridge.

RAM:

2048MB PC5300 DDR2 ram, 667MHz. Gingle Technology.

Display adapter:

Intel i915GM with 8MB dedicated DDR VRAM.

Hard drive:

80GB, 5400RPM, Sata II, ST980811AS. Seagate hard drive with 8MB Cache.

Display:

10" LCD 1024x600 display.

Battery:

6Cell-6600mAh.

Operating system:

Windows XP Home.

You can read the review itself here on Laptop-Review in the near future. In the meantime, you can have a closer look at the specs at http://event.asus.com/eeepc/comparison/eeepc_comparison.htm







All in all, the two laptops are almost identical in terms of specifications. The Asus Eee 1000H has 1 GB RAM less than the Eee 1000HD. The most important difference is presumably the processor, but we’ll see about that below.



Even the weights of the two machines are nearly identical, the Eee 1000H sports 1440 grams against 1465 grams for the Eee 1000HD.


Boot times and out of standby





Boot and out of standby times are measured from when the power button is pressed and the Windows desktop appears.

The Eee 1000HD is out of the starting booth slightly faster than the Eee 1000H, but the differences are so small they might as well be due to the amount of software loaded on the two laptops; the difference from standby is even lower. In general though, we can see that the special XP Home Edition that both netbooks have is a bit faster than a regular XP platform.


Battery performance



Idle times are measured at lowest power profile on the tested model, while Classic times are measured at highest performance profile. The laptops are tested with BatteryEater 2005 to find the maximum battery life at the current settings.

Atom beats Dothan; the Eee 1000H has a small advantage over the Celeron-based Eee 1000HD. Not enormous, but visible nonetheless.



The processor



The Eee 1000H comes with Intel’s newest Atom N270 processor, a low watt processor – but do you also get a lot of horsepower? We take a closer look at how it performs in the machine below. We can see that the internal L2 Cache is on 512 KB, and that the processor runs with 533 MHz FSB at 1.6 GHz.

SuperPi:



Super Pi calculates the number PI with 1 million decimals. The result is a time in seconds, meaning that the lower the number, the better. The PI can be used for direct comparison with other laptops that have run the same test.

Both machines perform far worse than what we have seen the last year here at Laptop-Review. At the same time though, it’s surprising to see how the 900 MHz slower Celeron in the 1000HD matches the 1.6 GHz Atom processor in the Eee 1000H. The score can be put into context by comparing it with a T9600 based laptop that scores about 16 – and yes, the lower the better!!! The two machines were generally surprisingly equal in performance.


SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic:





SiSoft Sandras Whetstone and Drystone benchmark tests the processor’s ability to do pure number crunching, which occurs during gaming or different forms of picture editing. The measure is in Mflops (Millions Floating Point Operations Per Second) – the higher, the better.

Looking at results, the difference is 30% in Atom’s favour. I was actually impressed by the performance of Intel’s new Atom processor – here’s lots of processing power. Another reason the Eee 1000H wins might be because of a newer and better chipset.


SiSoft Sandra CPU Multimedia:





The multimedia test in SiSoft Sandra is calculated on a 2D figure. The output (it/s) is Mandelbrot iterations per second, i.e. the bigger the better.

As could be expected, the results favour the Atom processor again. You get lots of performance here, and I would actually compare the processor with my old 1.6 GHz Dothan in my work computer.

RAM SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwith



The Eee 1000H comes with 1 GB DDR2 RAM that runs 667MHz, with the following timings: 4,4,4,12,16.



All of the 1 GB is situated in one rod.

2 GB is traditionally recommended on most new Windows 32 Bit based platforms, but you can easily upgrade the Eee to 2 GB. 







Sisoft Sandras Memory Bandwidth benchmark is used to measure the speed of the RAM – the higher the value, the better.

The result gives the Asus Eee 1000H an advantage over the 1000HD, though we should adjusts our results for the 1000H’s newer chipset and the 1000HD’s extra 1 GB RAM (which does not appear to be utilized to its full potential).


Hard drive performance - SiSoft Sandra Hard Drive Read



Sisoft Sandras hard drive test module is used to measure the performance of the hard drive. Sisoft Sandra runs a number of tests on the surface of
the hard drive and calculates the average reading speed.

The biggest surprise here was that the hard drive in the Eee 1000 HD – just a standard 2.5” 5400rpm hard drive from Seagates Momentus 5400.3 series – beat all previous records in 2.5” tests I’ve run!!! This negligible 80GB can run fast it seems, almost twice as fast than the seemingly identical hard drive in the Eee 1000H (which does reasonably well in any case). I do not pretend to understand why this is so, but you should probably expect performance of the 1000H to be the same for both models.





The results from HDTach confirm the picture painted by SiSoft Sandra: the hard drive in the Eee 1000H performs below average for a 5400rpm Sata 2.5” drive. Like RAM, the hard drive in a laptop is one of the few remaining bottlenecks that keep laptops from reaching the same level of performance as desktops.



Display adapter performance - 3Dmark



Both laptops come with Intel onboard graphical chips that are hardly suitable for gaming and high end graphics. Let’s see how they do in the test though. The Eee 1000HD caused some trouble and lost the ability to run direct3D graphics – I have not yet been able to solve the problem, but hope to make a full test of this later in connection with the review of the Eee 1000HD.

The 3Dmark tests show the performance in DirectX 9 and thus newer games and programs. No tests were run in DirectX 10.1, which both display adapters support.

The Eee 1000H would presumably beat the Eee 1000HD in all tests.
In general, the Eee 1000H performs like the Aspire One in XP, though the Aspire / Atom combination was the best.


Overall performance



The PCMark 05 results can be compared directly with other laptops that have run the same PCMark version. The program produces a score from a test that includes the performance of the processor, RAM, hard drive, display adapter, etc.

The score might not impress compared with the newest T9xx and T8xx series processors, but you still get plenty of power in the Eee 1000H.

Gaming


I would be ridiculous to call a netbook a gamer, but I tested the machine in a fitting game nonetheless, namely the online game Trackmania.



We tested with a 1024x600 resolution.

I shall let the pictures speak for themselves.









You get a lot of entertainment with the Eee 1000H, and the battery won’t fail you – even on a long drive.

Conclusion


The Eee 1000H is a fine expansion of the Eee series and has an impressive battery life. With more than six hours at normal use and almost four at full load, it clearly shows the potential of the Atom processor.
On the downside is the size; the weight of 1.4 kg makes the Eee 1000 series so heavy that 12.1” subnotes can compete with them. Another minus is a very Spartan software bundle that leaves you longing for more.
The Eee 1000H will cover most users’ needs at the home office with a 160 GB hard drive. With 2 GB RAM, as well as an external monitor and mouse, there’s lots of power for normal office use and the price is still impressive – 3,500.00 DKK is very competitive.
The Eee 1000H gives you Bluetooth, wireless network and lots of possibilities for expansion via USB; all it really lacks is 3G. All in all, the Eee 1000H is a lovely machine. If you need SSD, you can supplement with an SD card and install your sensitive data on it. Optical media can be loaded via network or USB; there really aren’t limits to these netbooks. Still, the Eee 1000H doesn’t sweep you off your feet, simply because of its size – too big to be a real netbook, and the weight of 1.4 kg makes is impractical. On the other hand, it’s too weak compared with other subnotes that we’ve tested. The price, however, makes it worth mentioning.

In total, I’ll round up and give it a nice 3.5.

Pros:

- Price

- Overall experience

- Display

- Impressive performance of processor and battery

- Software bundle

Cons:

- Lack of 3G


Battery: 4,5 / 5Graphics: 2,5 / 5{Moblitet 3,5}Software: 2,5 / 5Overall: 3.5 / 5