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Asus Eee 1000HD – Old school netbook

We continue our line of netbook tests with Asus’s Eee 1000HD, which won’t hit Scandinavian stores officially. The Eee 1000HD comes with an 80GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, and Intel’s slightly dated Dothan based Celeron M 353 processor.

 
The product was kindly lent to us by Asus (http://www.asus.com/)

Specifications

Category:
Internet and student laptop.

Processor:
Intel Celeron M 353, 900MHz, 512KB L2 Cache, 433MHz FSB.

Chipset:
Intel i915GMS, 82801FBM ICH6-M Southbridge.

RAM:
2,048MB DDR2, PC5300 RAM, 667MHz, Gingle Technology module, 2GB is max according to Asus.

Display adapter:
Intel i915GM, with 8MB DDR2 RAM.

Hard drive:
80GB Hard drive, 2.5”, 8 MB cache, 5400RPM.

Display:
10", WSGA TFT, resolution of 1024x600.

Sound card & speakers:
Realtek High Definition chipset, 24Bit stereo compatible. 2 built-in stereo speakers.

Optical drive:
None, but you can plug in an external drive via USB or share a drive via a 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.
1.47Kg 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 Works.

Price:
The Eee 1000HD  is priced at 2,999.00 DKK incl. VAT with Linux.
 

Package contents



I received the Eee 1000HD by mistake; the model doesn’t officially hit Scandinavian stores, and I actually was supposed to get the Eee 1000H. Since I got the chance though, it had to be reviewed.



Let’s take a closer look at what was tucked away in the package. All of the Eee 1000 series models have the same bundles, so we have the same package contents here as with the Eee 1000H.

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 1000HD out of the sleeve and have a closer look.
 

Physical aspects

First impression



The tested model was cast in white; the Eee 1000HD also comes in black and four special design variants in black, white, pink, and neon green.


The Eee 1000HD 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 1000HD is simple yet elegant. It seems surprisingly robust, which is impressive for a laptop that costs less than 3,000.00 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 Eee 1000HD comes with 2GM RAM though, which is the maximum.



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



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, and finally a card reader.



The Eee 1000HD 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, or even upgrade the easily accessible hard drive.

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 1000HD’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 1000HD 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 1000HD 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 1000HD is recommended in this regard.
 

Noise, heat, and power usage:



The Eee 1000HD uses up to 43W at full load, some 5W more than the Atom edition Eee 1000H, which bodes well for the battery life 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 1000HD might be a netbook, but the distance to a power outlet is the same...

I would describe the noise level from the Eee 1000HD’s coolers as low, even during gaming or running more demanding programs.
It’s time to look at how the insides of the Eee 1000HD 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 a 900MHz processor.
I have decided to put the Eee 1000HD up against another netbook, namely the Asus Eee 1000H, the only model that officially comes to Denmark.

The Asus Eee 1000H model had the following specifications:

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

Chipset:
Intel i945GME Chipset, ICH7-M/E Southbridge.

RAM:
1024MB PC5300 DDR2 RAM, 667MHz.

Display adapter:
Intel i945GME with 8MB dedicated DDR VRAM.

Hard drive:
80GB, 5400RPM, Sata II, hard drive with 8MB Cache.

Display:
10" LCD 1024x600 display.

Battery:
6Cell-6600mAh.

Operating system:
Windows XP Home.

You can read the review here on Laptop-review.eu: Asus Eee 1000H review

You can have a closer look at the specifications here







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.

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 1000HD comes with Intel’s Celeron M 353 processor, a low watt processor based on the slightly dated Dothan technology, 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 at 512KB, and that the processor runs with 400MHz FSB at 900MHz (433MHz FSB at 960MHz performance mode).

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. 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 again favour the Atom processor. You can still execute multimedia tasks with the Eee 1000HD, and it’s a perfectly fine entertainment centre for a long car- or train ride.
 

RAM SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth



The Eee 1000HD comes with 2GB DDR2 RAM.

All of the 2GB is situated in one rod.





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 drive 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 1000HD performs above 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, and I have not yet been able to solve the problem.



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.

Unfortunately, an error occurred on the Eee 1000HD in the middle of the installation. I sadly could not establish whether this was due to a Windows update or a software bug. Normally, the Eee models would have a recovery partition, but these test models did not. As such, I could not test the Eee 1000HD fully, but the Eee 1000H would presumably beat the Eee 1000HD in all tests.

Gaming

I would be ridiculous to call a netbook a gamer, but I did have my nephew test the machine in WOW before I encountered the error that made the execution of Direct3D impossible. The game was able to run fairly well.
You get a lot of entertainment with the Eee 1000HD, and the battery won’t fail you – even on a long drive.
 

Conclusion

The Eee 1000HD is the cheaper model in the Eee 1000 series and has an impressive battery life. The 2GB RAM is definitely an advantage, and the display is really good as well. Asus has informed me that all the Eee 1000 models comes with Works, so you get a reasonable software bundle as well.
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 1000HD will cover most users’ needs at the home office with its 80 GB hard drive. With an external monitor and mouse, there’s lots of power for normal office use and the price is still impressive – 3,000.00 DKK is very competitive.
The Eee 1000HD gives you Bluetooth, wireless network and lots of possibilities for expansion via USB; all it really lacks is 3G. All in all, the Eee 1000HD is a reasonably good 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. Would I pick this over the Eee 1000H? No. The additional price for an Eee 1000H might be 400.00-500.00 DKK and a RAM upgrade some 250.00-300.00 DKK, but the Atom processor is worth the higher price.
In total, I’ll round up and give it a 3.5 like the Eee 1000H.

Pros:
- Price
- Overall experience
- Display
- Impressive performance of processor and battery
- Software bundle

Cons:
- Lack of 3G

Battery: 4,5 / 5Graphics: 2,5 / 5Construction: 3,5 / 5Software: 2,5 / 5Overall: 3,5 / 5