Four Ion Netbooks Do Battle — Which One Wins?
With a slew of new netbooks powered by the Intel Atom N450 about to launch, I’d be hard pressed to recommend buying an older netbook right now. But if you’re feeling put off by lack of visual horsepower in an all Intel netbook, you might want to look into those with the Nvidia Ion platform. These devices pair a GeForce 9400M with the Atom CPU and simply blow away the Intel integrated graphics solution.
So although new devices are around the corner, Laptop Magazine placed four of today’s Ion-based netbook models into the ring to see which would be the last netbook standing. I won’t spoil the surprise, but if you’re still sold on today’s netbooks and want support for gaming and 1080p video playback, you’ll want to see which netbook won this prize fight. It’s noteworthy that when similarly spec’d out, these little laptops can run north of $550, although a bare-bones system with Ion can be had for $400. And don’t forget that next year’s netbooks will work with both the Nvidia Ion2 as well as Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator.
No surprise there. I won’t spoil it either, but ION does allow that free mini-PCIe slot to accomodate 3G/4G.
With all the talk of hardware video accelerators to supplement the Intel integrated graphics, folks sometimes forget that you need a high-res screen to make it really worthwhile. 1024×600 puts a hard limit on what you can do, but 1280×800 or 1466×768 is perfect for 720p playback.
I’m also partial to the smaller/lighter 10″ netbooks at this time. I believe anything bigger than 10″ is pushing the line with more capable 12″ and 13″ notebooks. After all, if it’s just a bigger display you need, you can pick up a 14″ Hp dv4 notebook for under $600 that’s far more capable too.
I’m hoping to go with a HP or Toshiba netbook for 2010. A Pinetrail unit with the Broadcom hardware video accelerator, 10″ 1366×768 display, Win 7 and 8-hour battery looks pretty good to me.