Page 7 - Battery Life and Conclusion

Special thanks to Charlton over at Asus for making this review possible.

Page 4 - A Closer Look - Software

The Asus Eee PC 4G's default operating system for the non-Windows version is a modified version of Xandros Linux, using a relatively lightweight IceWM window manager. It boots into the operating system from its 4GB SSD in around 20 to 25 seconds; a slimmed down version of Windows XP Professional installed on our Eee PC boots in around 30 seconds.

Page 6 - Onboard Sound (RMAA 6.06) Analyzation

Test Information:

Testing device: Realtek HD Audio output
Sampling mode: 16-bit, 44 kHz
Interface: DirectSound
Testing chain: External loopback (line-out - line-in)
RMAA Version: 6.0.6
20 Hz - 20 kHz filter: ON
Normalize amplitude: ON
Level change: -0.6 dB / -0.1 dB
Mono mode: OFF
Calibration singal, Hz: 1000
Polarity: inverted/inverted

Frequency response

Noise level

Dynamic range

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Intermodulation distortion

Stereo crosstalk

IMD (swept tones)

Test Summary

Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB: +0.25, -0.33 - Good
Noise level, dB (A): -64.4 - Poor
Dynamic range, dB (A): 64.3 - Poor
THD, %: 0.015 - Good
THD + Noise, dB (A): -58.0 - Poor
IMD + Noise, %: 0.178 - Average
Stereo crosstalk, dB: -62.0 - Average
IMD at 10 kHz, %: 0.234 - Average
General performance: Average

Page 5 - Benchmarks: EVEREST 4.50, HD Tach 3.0.1.0

About EVEREST Ultimate Edition

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings. CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

CPU and FPU benchmarks

State of the art multi-threaded benchmark methods to measure performance of both old and brand new processors. References list to compare actual performance with other systems.

Memory benchmarking

Memory read and write speed, memory latency measurement to stress the memory and cache subsystem, including references list to compare actual performance with other systems.

From: Developer's Page

The Asus Eee PC runs a Dothan core Celeron-M ULV processor rated at 900MHz; but downclocked to 630MHz (FSB is downclocked to 70MHz with multiplier of 6x). This allows some very modest cooling methods we've seen when we took apart the Asus Eee PC a few pages back -- and improved battery life -- but at the price of performance. Of course, the Asus Eee PC is never meant to be a performance machine anyways with very modest specifications -- and at this clock speed, the scores are reflected in our CPU and FPU performance tests with EVEREST 4.50.

At 70MHz FSB or 280MHz rated with QDR (Like all Intel processors from the last few years, there are four lanes connecting to theoretically quadruple the FSB), again we didn't expect astonishing performance. Generally speaking, these numbers were very acceptable in this form -- and we are benchmarking an Eee PC for low cost and portability, not a performance oriented system anyways. Just for references.

The implementation of an external memory controller, as well as low bandwidth between RAM and processor all contributed to relatively higher latency in the memory latency segment.

About HD Tach 3.0.1.0

HD Tach will test the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of your attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive, etc). All drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, 1394, USB, SATA and RAID are supported. Test results from HD Tach can be used to confirm manufacturer specs, analyze your system for proper performance, and compare your performance with others. HD Tach is very easy to use, quick, and presents data in easy to read graphs, including the ability to compare two storage devices on screen at the same time for easy analysis.

From: Developer's Site

The Asus Eee PC uses an 4GB Silicon Motion SM223A flash SSD -- which performance generally very well in terms of operating system and program load times. Our HD Tach results show the Asus Eee PC's internal drive performance to obtain an average read speed of 30.4MB/s. While not necessarily impressive compared to even most PMR 5400RPM laptop hard disks, the latency is really good at 0.5ms random access.

However, the downsides of having this SSD is that it's extremely slow once you're going through a lot of small files or getting the drive to work with multiple streams of data access -- downloading and installing those 100 Windows XP Updates between SP2 and SP3 took two or three hours, not to mention that opening anything simple like 'My Computer' takes five minutes.

The ICH6 Southbridge supplied USB ports didn't perform particularly well; under Windows XP we recorded an average read speed of 16.4MB/s with 1.1ms access latency with our OCZ Rally2 Turbo 4GB USB flash drive -- our official record performance for the drive on our desktop Intel ICH9R supplied USB ports came in at 32.8MB/s -- exactly twice as fast as the USB performance on the Asus Eee PC.

Page 3 - A Closer Look - Internal

Page 2 - A Closer Look - External

The Asus Eee PC is quite an interesting machine. From the external aspects, our Pearl White Eee PC 4G measures 22.5cm by 16.5cm for length and width; and 2.5cm height at its thinnest point and 3.5cm at its thickest point. Weighing 0.92kg with battery, this beautifully designed system doesn't look or feel cheap at all -- it's built solidly, with a clean design in front featuring the Asus logo across the front. The size is also very impressive as an ultraportable, low cost notebook -- the Asus Eee PC seems to impress everyone whenever I take it out!

There are no clips that holds the screen to the main body of the Eee PC, which proves to be very convenient -- not to mention there's one less part to break -- I actually managed to break one of those clips on my Dell Inspiron laptop last year. The power button is conveniently located between the battery and the right display hinge. While parts of the power button is accessible when the Eee PC is closed, the Eee PC won't turn on even when the power button is pressed.

Two thick bars are placed on both sides of the 7" LCD screen, which are designed for the speakers -- we'll go over that in just a second. The matte-finish LCD is placed between the bars -- which, after all, is a very small LCD after a few hours of use. You won't believe the feeling after using an Eee PC for a few hours and going to a 15.4" laptop. It's amazing.

The keyboard is QWERTY keyboard, but not all keys are present -- some are changed to an Fn function key, such as the Printscreen key is an alternate function of Insert. Many of the F-keys carry an alternate function for toggling wireless, sleep, adjusting screen brightness, as well as multimedia controls. As far as I'm concerned, from the drivers provided on Asus' website for the Eee PC I can't seem to be able to get the multimedia controls working under Windows XP -- the brightness and sleep button works flawlessly though.

The keys are also smaller than standard keyboards, in which I did find a bit odd to use when I first got the Eee PC -- hitting a few keys at a time, or simply typing the wrong thing is quite common. I got used to it after a few days, but I would not use the Eee PC to type any long documents.

For LEDs -- Power, Battery, HDD Activity, and Wireless -- are placed near the bottom right corner of the Eee PC. The way it's placed on the edge allows clear view of the Eee PC whether it's opened or close -- quite convenient in my opinion. The HDD and Power LEDs are green, while the Wireless LED is blue and the Battery LED lights up orange when it's being charged.

Located on the right side of the Asus Eee PC, from the left, is an SD card slot, two USB 2.0 ports, and an VGA out connector. The click and lock SD card reader allows flash memory cards to fully flush with the body of the Eee PC so nothing sticks out, which is great since many Eee PC users uses this slot to add extra storage capacity to their unit. The VGA out port is quite convenient, although its placement right next to the Kensington lock slot will not allow the use of both simultaneously.

Placed on the left side of the Asus Eee PC is an Ethernet jack, a capped dummy modem jack (Okay, would you really want an 56k modem nowadays anyway?), a third USB 2.0 port, and two 3.5mm audio jacks for microphone in and headphone out; powered by the Realtek ALC6628 HD codec. At the back right next to the left screen hinge is the DC power input connector. Generally speaking, the Asus Eee PC certainly doesn't lack in terms of expandability of connectors -- in fact, it's quite amazing how much Asus managed to fit on the Asus Eee PC despite its size limitations. Sweet stuff.

A small Synaptics touchpad is located near the center bottom of the Eee PC. The white background color of the touchpad sure fits within the central color scheme of our Pearl White Eee PC; a wide silver bar is placed at the bottom -- clicking near its left represents a left click, while a click near the right will make a right click. Basically, there are two tactile buttons under the single clicking bar. The touchpad supports vertical and horizontal scroll as you run your finger along the right and bottom edge of the touchpad, respectively.

Above the touchpad is the keyboard, like most laptops ever produced. As we've gone over it earlier, the buttons are slightly smaller than standard keyboards, which may impede users with larger fingers -- although I personally managed to get used to the Eee PC after a few days of use (My fingers are average sized though, nothing big, and nothing small). The keyboard generally gives an acceptable tactile feel; traveling distance is reasonable but resisting weight is not evenly distributed throughout the keys. The keys also feel a bit light and cheap sometimes -- often times, I have to sort of realign the keys in case they pop out one day or something. Speaking of which, the Home key you see above is basically the Windows/start key on standard Windows keyboards.

The matte finished LCD display is very nice and bright for most indoor applications, although in direct sunlight you may run into some trouble in terms of readability. The screen has a resolution of 800x480, in which I did find a bit too small in terms of screen real estate -- most dialog boxes are cut off along the bottom under Windows XP; I actually had to hit Enter or hit the Tab key to hit the OK button quite a few times. Additionally, some programs won't even run at this resolution -- you can fake a resolution to 800x600 and make the screen scroll, but that's a bit inconvenient. I must note that you can't go back to 800x480 once you've switched to 800x600 under Windows, you'll need to use something like ResSwitch to manually redefine the resolution.

The two thick black bars on both sides of the screen are the speakers -- which are beyond loud enough for quiet locations, but when you have twenty or so people in the room chatting the speakers won't be able to produce enough volume. If you look carefully, the drivers are only 1.5cm in diameter located near the top of the meshes on each side, so it's clear that the rest are for 'decoration' only (Most users don't find it pretty for such a thick bezel around the screen itself). The new Asus Eee PC 900 with a 8.9" LCD fills the entire screen with the speakers moved to the bottom of the unit for much better screen real estate and aesthetics.

I found it quite interesting that the Asus Eee PC actually doesn't allow settings for screen brightness based on power source -- all laptops I used for the last few years allow you to configure screen brightness independently as you're on battery or plugged in.

The Asus Eee PC 4G also features a webcam with a maximum resolution of 640x480 placed above the 7" LCD.

The 4-cell, 5200mAh battery is installed into the back of the Eee PC as it contains part of the center strip next to the hinges of the screen, while the bottom flushes in with the standoffs -- or should I say, the standoffs raises the Eee PC to a certain height in order to accommodate the battery. This design makes the Eee PC tilting forward towards the user, as the rear height is measured to be 1cm greater than the front of the unit. The battery is secured by two clips; with one spring loaded that you'll need to hold down in order to release the battery.

A series of vents are placed in various locations of the bottom of the Asus Eee PC.

Our Asus Eee PC 4G has an easily accessible RAM cover opening -- a warranty seal is placed over one of the screws, in which sparked quite a controversy amongst Eee PC users. Last I heard, Asus later clarified that opening the RAM cover doesn't necessarily void the warranty, which is good news to Eee PC users looking to upgrade from their 512MB RAM out of the box.

A condensed microphone is placed near the edge of the front center; bottom of the Asus Eee PC. The Asus Eee PC 4G is quite sweet for internet and communication -- considering that it has both a webcam and a built in microphone -- placed in an incredibly small package.

By: Jonathan Kwan
May 10, 2008

This review isn't done yet, lol.
But we're working on it. Like rly.

You can call it a fad, but the latest craze is not about the latest quad core laptop with a 8800 series graphics accelerator, several hard drives in RAID, and a 20" screen or whatever. Ever since the announcement of the Asus Eee PC, and its official launch just a few months prior to Christmas 2007, hardcore enthusiasts and general consumers alike has expressed immense interest in this piece of low cost, ultra portable laptop. Do a Google search. Read a tech blog. Log in to your latest forum. Engage in a conversation with a few friends. To be honest, being a reviewer for quite a few years now, there's not many products that I've sat there just to eagerly anticipate. The Asus Eee PC is one of those rare products -- and after using it since March and showing it off to quite a number of friends, I can see where all the excitement lays. That is, a few months after its release, I finally managed to get a hold of a unit of the Asus Eee PC 4G; previously known as the Eee PC 701. Using it almost daily for a month and a half, we now present to you our detailed long-ish term test of the popular fully loaded Asus Eee PC.

Our review unit of the Asus Eee PC 4G came in a brown corrugated cardboard box with tons of Asus tape over it, as we've come to be used to with our Asus shipments. Using FedEx International Priority, it arrived in less than 24 hours. Filled with packing peanuts inside, everything arrived in excellent condition. It took me some time to brush aside the packing material to reveal the glory and mystery of the Eee PC.

Our review unit of the Asus Eee PC 4G arrived in retail packaging. The box incorporates a relatively simple design across the front; with a light green background showing all the colors of the Eee PC in front and a small opened Eee PC photo at the bottom left corner. Similar design scheme implementations are used on all the sides; with the left side showing six color variations of the Eee PC side by side and a bullet underneath to indicate which color is the Eee PC inside the box. The bottom of the box continues to incorporate this simple design with a small listing of general specifications of the Eee PC. Generally speaking, the same box can be used for all models of the Eee PC besides the new Eee PC 900 -- the only distinguishing factor is a small label on the right side and the color bullet on the left.

Before we move on, let's take a look at the specifications of the Asus Eee PC 4G, as obtained from Asus' website:

- Model Name: Eee PC 4G
- Display: 7"
- Intel CPU & Chipset
- Operating System: Linux; Windows XP compatible
- Colors Available: Pearl White / Blush Pink / Sky Blue / Lush Green / Galaxy Black
- Ethernet Communication and WLAN
- Memory Installed: 512 MB (DDR2)
- SSD Storage (Solid-State Disk) - 4GB
- Camera
- Audio: Hi-definition audio, stereo speaker, microphone
- Battery: 4 Cells, estimated 2.8-3.5 hours depending on usage
- Weight: 0.92 kg

To move the story ahead a bit, yes we installed Windows XP Professional on our Asus Eee PC haha. That aside, we took a few CPU-Z screenshots -- the Celeron-M ULV Dothan processor is actually downclocked to 630MHz from 900MHz by reducing the FSB, but many Eee PC users used programs to restore its stock speed from Intel. Intel's i910GML with Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 integrated graphics is paired with the ICH6 Southbridge. A single module of DDR2 RAM is installed in one of the two slots; again downclocked to 70MHz to run 1:1 with the CPU at 3-3-3-8.

Our Asus Eee PC 4G review unit obviously wasn't a new one; evidence includes the box specifications don't match its contents (The box wasn't new, not to mention it says "Galaxy Black" when our Eee PC is obviously Pearl White... unless I'm colorblind haha), most of the packaging were missing, and the Eee PC itself's RAM cover seal was broken, and a screw was missing at the bottom too. My point is what we got out of the box were only the barely essentials -- the Asus Eee PC 4G itself, the 4-cell 5200mAh battery, a black case for protecting and carrying the Eee PC around, an an AC adapter. I believe that in a new retail package, there should be a manual and some software disc for Windows drivers, factory OS recovery, and the such.

That aside, the AC adapter is actually pretty sweet -- this wall adapter unit has foldable prongs that flushes into the rest of the adapter, and a Velcro strap to hold the cables together when you're travelling with it. Great design in my opinion.

Page 13 - Overclocking and Conclusion

For this review, I decided to go nuts and see what maximum overclock I could attain within somewhat reasonable voltage. Blowing 1.45V through the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane that runs at stock 2.3GHz (11.5*200), I set the VDDA voltage to 2.728V and lowered the HTT link and memory frequency to make sure nothing gets in the way. The multiplier is set to 10x for some ease in overclocking (I mean, who can do mental math nowadays if the multiplier is not 10x?) as well as seeing how the NVIDIA 780a SLI chipset can stack in terms of FSB. The fun begins.

Generally speaking, in our hours of overclocking and stability testing, the maximum overclock we were able to attain on the Asus M3N-HT Deluxe with the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane was 3.0GHz stably. We were able to boot a bit higher than 3.1GHz, but it wasn't Orthos stable. Since this is my first time overclocking with this specific chip and motherboard, I don't know how it compares against others, but from my internet sources it's pretty good from what I can see. I mean, despite our obsession with Intel and their insanely overclockable CPUs, the 65nm AMDs aren't bad in terms of overclocking either (Sans the voltages, but whatever, it's reasonable enough haha) -- 30% is really quite decent.

Vdroop is not very evident on the M3N-HT Deluxe -- the voltage control and regulation is decent on the M3N-HT Deluxe motherboard.

Special thanks to Wil over at Asus for making this review possible.

Starting from April 30, 2007, Number Ratings has been dropped for motherboards, RAM, and graphics cards. This is to ensure the most appropriate ratings reflected without the limits of using numbers. Everything else will continue using the Number Rating System.
More information in our Review Focus.

Sticking with AMD and need a sweet, full featured AM2 motherboard with decent overclocking capabilities? The Asus M3N-HT Deluxe is definitely a board worth considering!