Ion netbooks. Opinion?

JonJ678 · 20 Sep 2009 at 02:14

They've been rather slower to market than I hoped, and seem to cost about £100 over the intel onboard graphics.

Under what use are they justified? I'm looking at one of the Samsungs, and wondering if there's any point to spending more for the ion chipset (or ion le, which I've just heard of).

If they can allow the atom to process high definition video, then this may be worth considering. Otherwise I'm unsure what purpose a better gpu serves in a netbook, what do you think?

AbsenceJam · 20 Sep 2009 at 04:34

If you've been looking at them then surely you've seen reviews, Ion can play games fairly capably and play Blu-ray.

JonJ678 · 20 Sep 2009 at 08:29

Indeed. The consensus seems to be that ion netbooks can game after a fashion. I was wondering if the system is capable of anything beyond this.

I suppose are the ion netbooks any different to the intel ones, except for the more powerful graphics card? The question is simple if its whether or not gaming is worth an extra hundred, but more complex if the systems are more different than this

AbsenceJam · 20 Sep 2009 at 15:14

It's the Atom processor with faster RAM and a 9400M. Aside from gaming you can play HD video and more applications are starting to support CUDA (offloading to the GPU) so it has other benefits.

robiow · 20 Sep 2009 at 15:57

Don't buy an Ion netbook, I'm cancelling my pre-order, just type samsung n510 into YouTube to see a number of gameplay videos. I'm not buying it with the intention of playing many games, but the performance is completely below what I expected

JonJ678 · 2 Oct 2009 at 01:05

Bit of necromancy, but in the end I went with the samsung N140, it'll be here on monday. So not an ion one after all. Cheers

Raikiri · 2 Oct 2009 at 05:21

I'll be buying the HP 311c (Ion LE), the graphics is useful for more than just gaming.

Video acceleration, Photoshop CS4, video encoding etc. are all much better on Ion based systems.

Then there's the fact they are 'premium' systems so slightly larger screen and higher resolutions will be more standard (11.6" and 1366x768 in this case).

raptormonkey · 2 Oct 2009 at 11:31

HP 311 looks like a nice netbook. Be nice to see some user reviews when it comes out over here.

bledd · 2 Oct 2009 at 11:58

they aren't meant to be gaming pc's, just look at the processor..

atom's are great, but number crunchers they are not.

the ion is designed to take the GPU load for playing videos

raptormonkey · 2 Oct 2009 at 14:22

Not after a gaming netbook myself.

Aod · 4 Oct 2009 at 13:32

Gaming + Netbook = fail

frankly, gaming + laptop = fail.
if you want to game, do it right, get a desktop. laptops are for working on the go.