Ion netbooks. Opinion?

Soldato
Joined
22 Dec 2008
Posts
10,370
Location
England
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?
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
22 Dec 2008
Posts
10,370
Location
England
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
 
Soldato
Joined
2 Nov 2007
Posts
4,184
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.
 
Associate
Joined
5 Aug 2009
Posts
22
Location
Newport, Isle of Wight
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
 
Soldato
Joined
5 Jul 2005
Posts
17,995
Location
Brighton
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).
 
Don
Joined
21 Oct 2002
Posts
46,744
Location
Parts Unknown
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
 

Aod

Aod

Soldato
Joined
7 Oct 2004
Posts
8,662
Location
London
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.
 
Back
Top Bottom