Wikifun happed to see that HP has the official XP drivers up on their site now! Finally no more digging around trying to find what works were. Thanks wikifun!
Update: liliputing.com is reporting that the drivers have been pulled down. (confirmed)
Update: the drivers are back up now
Over in the First Impressions of XP on the Mini-Note post, Peach1200 suggested I try the K-Lite Mega Codec pack and Media Player Classic on some high-definition QuickTime videos. I was very impressed by the results. The 480p and 720p QuickTime trailers and some 720p WMV movies played back flawlessly in Media Player Classic. It really is a night and day difference. Thanks for sharing that Peach!
It really is way better with XP on the Mini-Note. YouTube videos play fine, Hulu is almost watchable in small screen, DVDs look great, and 480p QuickTime Trailers are watchable (still dropped frames, but less than Hulu). In general the performance is way better than Vista with XP on it. The one thing I do miss from Vista though is it’s power management let you set throttle the cpu to a certain percentage. I’m still playing with couple 3rd party apps trying to pick the best one.
XP is definitely way better than Vista on the Mini-Note. I’ll have an official review, some videos and updated benchmarks soon.
Hi everyone, I have some more fun performance/benchmark tests of the Mini-Note running Vista. This should give you an idea of how well it can (or can’t) run.
Mini-Note #1 = VIA C7-M 800Mhz, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD, Chrome 9 Graphics, Vista Business
Mini-Note #2 = VIA C7-M 1200Mhz, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD, Chrome 9 Graphics, Vista Business
Mini-Note #3 = VIA C7-M 1600Mhz, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD, Chrome 9 Graphics, Vista Business
Desktop #1 = 1800Mhz AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1800Ghz), 1GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD, Nvidia 6200, Windows Media Center
Desktop #2 = 1867Mhz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 7200 RPM HD, Nvidia 7600GT, Windows Media Center
Note, that all the Mini-Notes are actually the 1.6Ghz model underclocked with the power management settings. Also I messed up and somehow ended up with 3DMark03 instead of 3DMark06. I will have this updated ASAP.
| Comp | Geek Bench | Passmark | 3DMark03 | PCMark |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mini-Note #1 | 300 | 101 | 236 | 528 |
| Mini-Note #2 | 393 | 118.7 | 316 | 726 |
| Mini-Note #3 | 532 | 153.6 | 358 | 930 |
| Desktop #1 | 1,324 | 310 | 10,029 | 2,263 |
| Desktop #2 | 2,162 | 669.1 | 15,151 | 5,154 |
| Comp | MOV to AVI | MOV to FLV |
|---|---|---|
| Mini-Note #1 | 15:30.35 | 5:40.83 |
| Mini-Note #2 | 10:24.18 | 4:25.34 |
| Mini-Note #3 | 8:18.23 | 2:56.83 |
| Desktop #1 | 3:17.00 | 1:12.15 |
| Desktop #2 | 2:13.93 | 47.68 |
See the Mini-Note Vista Video Encoding Benchmarks post for full details.
I’ll be installing XP on my Mini-Note tonight and I’ll those numbers up soon so we can the difference. Should be really interesting.
jkOnTheRun has a video of a video call through Skype on XP. It looks good enough and doesn’t seem to drop any frames or audio. This is a huge improvement over Skype’s performance in Vista which is good news for those of you worried about the VIA C7-M processor. It still a little underpowered, but the processor a decent operating system and it will handle the basic stuff well enough.
Check it out: http://www.jkontherun.com/2008/05/jkontherun-geek.html
The winner of our forums contest is skullhead. Congratulations on winning the Waterfield Designs sleeve case!
Check back next week for a new contest!
Continuing on with my reviews of the 1.6Ghz Mini-Note (KX870AT) this time I’ll be focusing on video play back.
Web Videos
I tried out various videos on Hulu, YouTube, Metacafe and Break to test the Mini-Notes Flash (FLV) movie playback. Videos from each site, except Hulu, played back watchable but did have some noticeable dropped frames. Nothing too terrible though. Hulu played back awful. The Mini-Note just couldn’t keep up with their videos.
AVI Videos
I was very impressed with the Mini-Note’s performance playing back AVI movies. I tried two different movies which played flawlessly in small or full screen modes. The only issue I ran into was when resizing the Windows Media Player window. The video would seem to get delayed and then rush to catch up. (it looked like it was fast forwarding, but the audio was fine). I was most impressed by the fact they still played perfect with the processor running at 800Mhz instead of 1600Mhz.
While they did play great with no other active apps, when surfing the web or using Word they did start dropping frames or the audio would get out of sync.
Details of the videos used:
Video 1
Filesize: 1.5GB
Frame Dimensions: 720×304
Data Rate: 227kbps
Total Bitrate: 449kbps
Framerate: 23fps
CPU Usage: 45-60%
Video 2
Filesize: 700MB
Frame Dimensions: 608×336
Data Rate: 103kbps
Total Bitrate: 112kbps
Framerate: 23fps
CPU Usage: 30-40%
QuickTime Videos
QuickTime’s high definition video trailers really left something to be desired. The 480p version was the only one close to being watchable, and only then after you waited for it to completely download. The 720p and 1080p versions dropped frames like crazy and were unwatchable (unless you like audio slideshows). Any of the videos in full screen also didn’t not playback acceptably either.
On the SD side of things, the Small and Medium sized trailers played great. The Large sized trailer played very well once it finished downloading the movie. While it was downloading there were some dropped frames and jerky motion.
DVD Playback
To test DVDs I borrowed an internal Lite-on DVD/CDRW drive from one of the desktops and connected it to the Mini-Note with an IDE to USB converter. For playing the DVD I used PowerDVD 8. DVD playback had a lot of dropped frames and audio that skipped in either small or fullscreen modes. Sadly it wasn’t enjoyable at all.
Summary
Overall I think the Mini-Note with Vista handles video playback fine considering it’s not really meant for that sort of thing. Hopefully when 2133 is refreshed with Isaiah or Atom in the coming months we’ll see a big improvement on video playback.
I didn’t install XP last night because I wanted to run some more benchmarks so we could have some hard numbers to compare to when I’ve installed XP. Today I ran two video encoding tests:
So we have something for comparison now, I ran my two desktops through the same tests. The Intel Desktop has a Core 2 Duo E6300 overclocked to run at 1867Mhz (from 1600) with 2GB of RAM, and 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB cache hard drive. The AMD Desktop has an Athlon 64 3000+ running at 1802Mhz, with 1GB of RAM, and a 7200RPM 80GB hard drive. Each has Windows Media Center Edition on it. The Mini-Note is running a VIA C7-m 1.6Ghz processor, along with 2GB of RAM, 120GB 7200 RPM HD, and Windows Vista Business. I also decided to put the 2133 into Power Saver mode so the CPU would be throttled to 800Mhz and run separate tests at that speed as well. (actually I accidentally left the Mini-Note in Power Saver mode from when I was testing video playback and ran the first FLV conversion with it like that…)
Here are the results of the tests, enjoy:
| Test Description | Mini-Note @ 800 Mhz | Mini-Note @ 1200 Mhz | Mini-Note @ 1600 Mhz | Intel Desktop @ 1867Mhz DC | AMD Desktop @ 1802Mhz |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MOV to AVI | 15:30.35 | 10:24.18 | 8:18.23 | 2:13.93 | 3:17.00 |
| MOV to FLV | 5:40.83 | 4:25.34 | 2:56.83 | 47.68 | 1:12.15 |
I’ll have some more videos (once I can get a better camera) and some more reviews soon. If anyone wants to try this with their eeePC, or other netbook, and share their results let me know. I’ll send you a link where you can download the MOV file I used and other info for running the tests.
*UPDATED* Added times for 1200Mhz
Laptop Magazine recently interviewed Kyle Thornton, HP’s product manager for the Mini-Note. What has drawn the most attention to the interview is the following question:
Laptop Magazine: What is your take on the upcoming Intel Atom platform? Do you see it beating out VIA?
Kyle Thornton: I think it’s too early to call a winner. HP is talking to both Intel and VIA and we are in the middle of this discussion. We will make a decision for future road maps in due time. In the same platform, we probably won’t offer both options. We will settle on one.
Mr. Thornton tries to throw some uncertainty into the mix of whether or not the upcoming models of the Mini-Note will stay with Via. I don’t know if this was intentional, or just posturing to remind Via they’re not the only chips in town. I do know that it would be completely ridiculous for HP to redesign the Mini-Note for the Atom chip when Via’s new Isaiah chip will just pop right in with no changes to the rest of the hardware. Redesign, re-certify and re-tool the manufacturing process, or just plug something a little different in?
Laptop Magazine is putting three netbooks through a type-off to see which one is the best to type on. So far they’ve tested the eeePC and the Mini-Note, and tomorrow they will show the results of the CTL 2Go PC.
All but one of the testers did better on the MIni-Note’s keyboard than the eeePC’s. I think the Mini-Note will be the overall champ because the 2Go PC has a really cramped keyboard like the eeePC.
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