Netbook Showdown! Acer Ferrari One Vs Asus EEE 1201

[Sam Jones]

FIGHT!

I'm in the market for a Windows netbook. I want something more compact than a laptop, but more powerful and comprehensive than an iPad i.e. still a PC. As well as the usual movies/music/interwebs, I want to do some "light" gaming on it, and by that I don't mean I expect to run Crysis, but games from the GOG library, Fallout 1 and 2, Diablo 2, the lighter games from my Steam account, like Children of the Nile, Hinterland, World of Goo, Deus Ex, maybe even Civ 4 or Torchlight. That sort of stuff.

I've narrowed it down to the Acer Ferrari One and the Asus EEE 1201. I'm having trouble deciding between the two, as they both seem great. Despite being a desktop PC gamer, I'm also not sure how to gauge the performance of the netbook processors and GPUs.

Anyone had any experience with either of these and would like to comment? Or if you have an idea of how they compare performance-wise, that would be great.

[Tortilla]

It sounds like you want a small laptop, not a nebook per se. Netbooks typically sacrifice every imaginable spec in order to get the smallest and cheapest thing that can run Windows, a browser, and maybe Office.

The Acer you listed isn't a netbook, it has a real CPU so I'd classify it as very small lightweight laptop. The Asus, on the other hand, is a true netbook which means an Atom processor and generally feeble specs. I would guess that the Acer will run rings around the Asus in every performance measure except possibly battery life. I'd recommend the Acer.

Actually, not what I've seen the specs, I sort of want one too.

[Sam Jones]

It sounds like you want a small laptop, not a nebook per se. Netbooks typically sacrifice every imaginable spec in order to get the smallest and cheapest thing that can run Windows, a browser, and maybe Office.

They do traditionally, yes, but that's why I've narrowed it down to these two - they're gruntier than other netbooks.

The Acer you listed isn't a netbook, it has a real CPU so I'd classify it as very small lightweight laptop. The Asus, on the other hand, is a true netbook which means an Atom processor and generally feeble specs. I would guess that the Acer will run rings around the Asus in every performance measure except possibly battery life. I'd recommend the Acer.

The N330 Atom in the Asus is also dual-core, which is unusual for netbooks. From what I've been able to tell, they both have roughly comparable performance.

[ARogan]

I believe the ION (9400m) in the asus handily beats the hd 3200 in the acer if you care about graphics.

[lesslucid]

This is not really about performance but, if you buy a Ferrari-branded netbook, some people may make... judgements, about your personality.

[Ar]

I have no experience with these CPUs but owned two netbooks, both with single core Atom, one with vanilla graphics and the other with ION.

The CPU was the bottleneck.
The ION one, a Samsung n510, was a disappointment: most 3d games I tested maxed at an often unplayable 15 fps, regardless of the graphic resolution. 2d games were similarly slow.
Of those you mentioned, I remember Diablo 2 being slow and Hinterland little more than a slideshow.

I assume that unless games make use both cores of the new Atom, they'll still be seldom playable. No idea about the AMD's performance. In the end I'd give preference to the better CPU rather than the graphics chip.

[pg]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3761/acer-ferrari-one I wasn't that impressed with the review. I thought I saw a review of the other model you linked and was a bit more impressed but in the end I recommend skipping both those models and going for a CULV based 11-13" laptop.

edit: other review http://www.anandtech.com/show/2896/1

[Sam Jones]

Just an update - I went for the Asus 1201n in the end. The Ferrari one had a decent spec, but obviously says a bit too much about its owner ;-)

The machine is great. Very compact, silent and quite the little beast for its size. Once I'd got rid of all the bloatware (seriously, it has a 25-30% CPU hit at rest straight out of the box) I installed a bunch of stuff from Steam and a few other games. All the games I've tested so far, being Torchlight, CotN, Pirates!, Deus Ex, Fallout 2, World of Goo, Rome Total War and The Secret of Monkey Island SE have all run like champs. I thought Torchlight might be a problem, but it runs fine in the machine's natve res of 1360*768, and not even in netbook mode. It runs the Win7 Aero UI flawlessly.

I'm definitely going to replace the RAM with 4gb of faster stuff, maybe swap out the HDD for a 7200rpm unit and look into overclocking the CPU.

[ioticus]

That's good to hear as I just ordered the 1201n myself.

[Sam Jones]

That's good to hear as I just ordered the 1201n myself.

Get yourself over here for drivers:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=81761

and here for a bloatware removal list:

http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=82526

[ioticus]

Thanks for the links, that will really help.

[DennyA]

Rather than putting a stock 7200 rpm drive in, look at the new Seagate Momentus XT SSD hybrid drive. 500GB of storage, and boots and loads apps at almost SSD-like speed thanks to a 4GB flash buffer that intelligently analyzes the files you access most and puts them in the buffer.

Just put one in my notebook and it's seriously sweet.

[ioticus]

I received the 1201n but haven't done anything with it yet because it didn't come with a restore dvd as listed in the manual. After investigating apparently ASUS stopped including restore dvds in their netbooks after January of this year for "environmental" reasons. I think there may be a way to create one yourself if you have at least a 32 GB flash drive but I contacted ASUS and hope they will send me the dvd so I don't have to buy a flash drive just to back up my system.

[Rward]

Hah!

I got one of these little beauties on "The Day Before Today" (I'm losing days - so it could have been Thursday?)..

Started up windows, did the Bios upgrade and then installed Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix.
Besides grabbing the correct wireless driver and updating the graphics driver, everything is running perfectly "out the box" (straight off the ubuntu install).

I'm looking to use it for mysql, apache, php, perl development and as a media center (XMBC already installed) and so far it's doing the job excellently!