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Asus N10 Review — the First Netbook For Gaming
Kim Hawley writes "Mobile Computer has a review of another new netbook from Asus. The N10 comes from Asus’ notebook division rather than its Eee PC division, and has an impressive specification. Most notable are the ExpressCard/34 slot and switchable nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics, and the video shows the N10 playing Call of Duty 4 very smoothly. Pre-orders in the US are around $600 – about the same as the Eee PC 1000. The N10 is closer to a traditional laptop than a true netbook, though – is feature-creep killing this new market already?"
From TFA:
In addition to the same so-so Intel 945 graphics found on other netbooks, the N10 also has a discrete nVidia GeForce 9300M graphics chipset - enabled with the flick of a switch (and a reboot)
Very strange feature, definitely the first I've heard of this. You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?
Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics! Powerful microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I personally feel laptops aren't good enough for serious gaming. Even though you connect a mouse, the keyboard still cannot match up to a regular size keyboard. There is the issue of heat and needing to be hooked up for max CPU freq and display brightness. Don't get me wrong - I love gaming laptops - they make great machines for development and running VMware images but in general I laugh at the idea of gaming laptops (upgrades? *smirk*).
Gaming netbook though in my opinion borders on ridiculous. The N10 has a 10.2" screen. Checking the AH in wow sure. Using counterstrike as an expensive chat client while you idle in the start zone? Sure. Playing Solitaire and Bejewelled? Sure. Serious gaming? F that.
It's almost like firms hate catering to the ultra low end, with its vanishingly small margins, or something...
Feature creep can hardly be said to be "killing" the netbook market, as long as cheap low end netbooks continue to be sold; but one does get the impression that Asus et al. would love for you to consider something a little more expensive. The market that toys like this will probably kill is the ultra-high-end mini notebook segment.
The high end mini notebook market has been around for years, Sony probably being the most notable. Classic netbooks are a threat, in that they skim off the people who want portability but don't need high end features but might have purchased a mini notebook because they were the only thing going; but they are too wimpy to kill the segment. However, as seems to happen a lot in technology, cheap crap is better at moving upmarket while staying cheap than premium gear is at moving downmarket while staying good. With the vast bulk of 300-400 dollar netbooks floating around, modest upgrades in spec and build quality, like the device reviewed in TFA, are still cheap and small; but are almost as good is the high end mini notebooks of old.
I'm not predicting the total doom of that segment, some people are still willing to pay a premium for the best; but I suspect that this system, and others like it, really annoy the traditional makers of high end mini notebooks.
You want a netbook for gaming?! The Eee does it all! Perfect controller as well!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QSW9qOM6FM
The Eee PC 1000 should be much less than $600. I live in Europe so I am not sure about the prices in the US, but here in EU it's one of the cheapest laptopsin general, let alone among the ultraportables!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I have been looking for something that I can develop on the go (needs battery life) as well as run the games I am devving (needs graphics card). This has me really excited. If it lives up I will probably be purchasing one.
This is more of a preview rather than a review, especially since they mention they'll post their full review next week.
This guy's the limit!
Simply being a personal opinion, I believe that traditional notebooks will see a sale rise in 2009.
When the EEE was announced I made a bet with a friend as to whether netbooks would shake the notebook market up and turn it a little inside out, and yes, they did.
But looking at what I feel I would buy when I wanted a portable computer, during all of 2008 I strongly felt I'd get some kind of netbook (I particularily had my eye on the Acer devices), but now i feel that I'd really want a normal work machine with a big screen, almost fullsize keyboard, good connectivity (optical drive, etc) (I currently own no notebook at all).
That said, I must say that for me, a normal notebook should always be the default decision (I'm a C++ developer), but having had a lot of free time in 2008 it seems I have let myself go asway. Wonder how that was for other people.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
is feature-creep killing this new market already?
The market will define itself, not what hand-wringers think it should be. If the slightly-larded up Netbooks sell, well then, that's the market. If the race to the bottom, barebones lappies are what people want, then that will be what the market produces.
Markets don't die, they adapt to what consumers want, not how neato some people think a sub-$500 laptop is for society.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Do we care more about having a lot of different options for the user, or about protecting this "new market"?
I really don't think that every new useful product has to become part of some special "market" just because reviewers and marketing people feel the need to categorize and simplify absolutely everything.
I've seen too many good, innovative products die on the vine because the PR machine didn't quite know what to do with it. And have no doubt, sites like Mobile Computing, Engadget, Gizmodo, are nothing but cogs in the giant Moloch of the marketing departments and soap peddlers who have created this consumerist dystopia.
If it's a good product, it doesn't have to be destroyed just because it doesn't fit neatly on a tab of some big box store's website.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Whatever happened to that bullshit from AMD where you could run integrated graphics, and switch over to discrete graphics when the need arose.
I believe they also let you run crossfire across them, though it was immature and you'd get anywhere from a ~10% increase to a ~20% decrease.
One of the neat things was that the discrete gpu would be nearly dead when not in use, but would automatically come to life when you needed it.
I guess that all hinged on AMD getting a chipset that was worth a damn to market. Hybrid Crossfire they called it.
This is something that has been extensively and well discussed in this book. Traditional companies always have a lot of difficulty trying to compete with new products that come from "below", i.e. have less features but are cheaper than the current products.
Mini-computers killed almost all of the old mainframe manufacturers, just like personal computers put the mini-computer sellers out of business. Now it's the time for the PC manufacturers to feel the heat, I expect a big restructuring of the whole industry in the next few years.
There's this new invention that might be just the thing for you. It's a kind of load-bearing device, deceptively simple really - just a flat surface supported by one or several "legs". I believe in industry lingo such devices are called "tables".
Yeah, but it seems to me the whole concept was that these are ultra-cheap PCs that aren't really good for a whole lot of serious computing, but are perfectly fine for surfing the net. Hence, "netbook."
If this thing is even half good enough for its intended purpose, isn't it sort of a ... gamebook, or something?
Further, I always thought "gamer PC" meant "tricked-out, high performance machine with emphasis on the graphics card and a bunch of blue LEDs in the case." The concept of marketing a "gamer system" that explicitly scrapes the bottom of the barrel seems odd.
Breakfast served all day!
They're called laptops for a reason! Except these ones are netbooks. So perhaps they are to be rested on top of a modem and held like a book.
which is totally what she said
Well, if you want to go into semantics, they have not been called 'laptops' by their respective manufacturers for about 7+ years now (at least none which I have seen - feel free to point a true 'laptop' out to me if you are aware of any links).
Cheers
oh, you mean like a desk?
My DESKTOP COMPUTER is sitting on it.
I type this laying on my bed - with my "laptop" lying next to me. And before you guys make the predictable "that's all you'll ever have lying next to you" jokes, I first got this laptop so I could play video games lying next to my girlfriend as she does her homework on her laptop.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Meh, I'd never really thought about it before. Try this Dell link. Notebooks, subnotebooks etc are still all just subcategories of 'laptop', and a desktop is still a desktop even if it goes under your desk :p Some other poster pointed out that some manufacturers may be scared of lawsuits about burned laps and such so that's why the term laptop isn't used as often. Perhaps for the Dell US site they avoid the term completely, but people in the UK still haven't given in to the sue-happy culture quite yet (though we will still complain a lot :) ).
I was just joking with my original post btw.
which is totally what she said
My Dell M170 video card and mobo choked after about a year and a half due to heat. Fortunately, I had a two year warranty. After that mess was cleared up, I extended the warranty out another 3 years, the max I could buy for that machine.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
if people are willing to type on the qwerty keyboards on smartphones, then i'm sure a mini-notebook is plenty ergonomically functional.
you prefer mid-sized notebooks, personally? well of course. that's probably what most people prefer as well. that's why they're the mid-size.
but it's not inconceivable that someone might need/want something a little bigger or a little smaller than your personal preference.
personally, i'm looking to get a tablet. i don't do any gaming, but as a graphic designer i need a larger screen than most casual computer users. so it makes sense for me to look for something that's on the larger end of the scale. or do you think that everyone should just have the same sized laptop regardless of what their needs are?
don't be afraid to venture out of your solipsistic universe once in a while.
My daughter has two laptops, an IBM T30 and an Asus EEE. The T30 stays in her room and is used for movies, itunes, homework. The EEE stays in her purse and is used for web, chat, email when she's out of the house, and occasionally to do homework when she wants to work on the kitchen table or upstairs in front of the TV. Before she got the EEE, she tried carrying around the T30, but size, weight and battery life made this a real chore.
Trying to develop C++ applications or run Halo 3 is not what these netbooks were designed for, and they -- still -- do what they *are* designed for very well. Trying to push them into areas they were not meant to go will -- duh -- give you questionable results. Like Max Payne running on a Surf, it's amazing that it works at all.
Yes, the keyboard kinda sucks and the screen is small. But the T30 won't fit in a purse, and my Latitude D620 *certainly* won't fit. When you need to look something up or send an email, any computer is better than no computer at all, and your big fancy white-hot dual core monster sitting at home isn't going to be any help when you're sitting here right now. The best computer is the one within reach, and the netbook is more likely to be with you when you're out of the building.
Moreover, the EEE will keep going long after the others have gone dark. For this reason, I sometimes borrow it for times when I won't be near a power source. (I wish she hadn't picked pink, though.)
And as cramped as the EEE is, it's still a damned site better than my Treo for web.
There may be a need for a bigger screen and better keyboard amongst those looking for a portable web appliance, but if it substantially increases the footprint, it breaks the paradigm. Moreover, I suspect that letting the price creep up makes it less attractive for people looking for an additional device, more portable than their mongo laptop but providing a better experience than their cell phone.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A surprising number of stories that make it to the front page have a rhetorical, leading question. In this case: "is feature-creep killing this new market already?" The question itself begs the question - is this new netbook a victim of "feature creep"? I know that anyone else who cares about logic in their arguments is bothered as much as I am. I wish that the editors would filter this sort of nonsense out before they post.
What's with the terrible no contrast image? Who on earth thought of that one?
Maybe it's a test for people who want to spend all day squinting at a tiny 10 inch laptop screen.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I have long wished that there was a way to upgrade the GPU in mobiles. Obviously something like this would be relatively niche, but then again so are gametops. Certainly the professional market would appreciate this. Does anybody if this has ever been attempted before and what the effect was?
How do you `kill` a market? There's a demand for small, cheap PCs. I bought one (the Aspire One). It's great. If people want to produce PCs which are bigger and more expensive then they're not really netbooks any longer, but they're not killing anything either.
Great way to learn Linux. If Linux people really want to turn people away from Windows I'd make sure they stay on top of all the questions in the Aspire and EEE forums and make sure people don't get pissed off when they have to type stuff to make their OS recognize the USB key they just plugged in, etc.
is feature-creep killing this new market?
The key definers for a "netbook" are weight, size and stamina - battery life. And of course some sort of mobile "net" capability.
As long as these are respected, then bring the features on - doesn't that go without saying?
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With Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on my original Eee 701.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
I've been considering getting a netbook, and noticed that while most are based around Intel's integrated GMA graphics, there was another unusual exception -- the Raon Everrun Note. Almost every netbook out there is based around Intel's Atom CPU, with occasional Core/Celeron ones.
This one was unusual in that it is equipped with an AMD Turion64 x2 CPU paired with ATI RS690E graphics. The RS690SE is integrated, but supposedly much faster than Intel's, and comes with dedicated graphics memory (what they call "sideport"). It looks like it should be a pretty good performer for a netbook -- so right now for me it is a tossup between this and the N10.
403 Forbidden
Let's say you have an incredibly dumb hypothesis, but you don't want to claim it. Add a question mark, and you can still say the same thing and you can pretend you're still a news organization rather than the National Enquirer.
"Obama is a Muslim" turns into "Is Obama a Muslim?"
"Palin Faked Preganancy" turns into "Did Palin Fake Her Pregnancy?"
As with all asinine journalistic methods, this was mainstreamed by Fox News, and covered hilariously by the Daily Show. It's supposed to hook people with outrageous and patently false statements to boost ratings. Instead of information you get speculation, which is worthless.
The last safe haven is NPR. Why? Public funding allows journalists to be journalists and not just the lapdogs of marketing departments. This is also why the BBC remains one of the most trusted news organizations in the world.
Gaming laptop != gaming NETbook.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Pardon my rant; it is not directed at you necessarily, but I'm so fed up with this whole "Free Market As Religion" nonsense that your little blurb broke my camel's back today.
Why do people get so pentecostal about it? It's like waxing poetic about gravity or something. --Except Newton wasn't pushing his theory for manipulative reasons. Take a look at the original proponents of Free Market theory; they're in tight with the Reagan/Bush family tree, and now we have Bush back-pedaling on the theory with his 700 Billion dollar bailout because, as it happens, Free Market theory certainly does work. It's just that in the final analysis, a 'market correction' can equal 'the burning of Rome'.
The Free Market doesn't care if the human population gets decimated to accommodate the law of the jungle. But I do. And guess what? If I decide to tweak the jungle rules by declaring open season on Saber-toothed tigers, rather than let them run wild according to some cultist philosophy, then I betcha my tribe will live longer than the idiot monkeys clinging to their trees because of some half-baked theory, --sold to them by the freakin' Tigers. The Wallstreet gurus came up with the damned theory in order to keep everybody else enslaved. It wasn't for our good. It was for their good. And you can tell! --ANY theory which circles so closely around dogma and knee-jerk emotionalism and fear, is suspect. Oooooh. Socialism is scaaaaary. Feel your breast pound with anxiety! --Anti-socialist thinking has all the same earmarks as your friendly neighborhood church brainwashing clinic. But despite this, half the geeks around here twaddle on into the same old traps just because the words used by the preacher happen to be different. Instead of Preachers, we have Economists. Instead of a never-to-be-questioned fairy in the sky, we have the never-to-be-questioned state-sanctioned, group-think, "Almost-Science". --Official Culture, masquerading as Enlightened Thought.
All people need to do is look for the patterns, and in the case of Free Market Economics, the patterns are painfully obvious: Fervent Believers repeating Mantras over and over and over. Newton didn't foam at the mouth or get an endorphin rush from giving sermon on the mount speeches about the laws of motion. So when you see this kind of behavior, you can be damned sure that there it's being pumped on TV by some funding agency with an agenda, or it's being force fed into bright-eyed university kids by charismatic professors giving sermons instructing them according to their own good book.
So that's my rant.
Again I want to stress that this isn't aimed at you specifically, so I'm sorry for sounding brutal. --Though I will say that your point about the shape of the netbook market, while somewhat correct, isn't determined by the Free Market alone. There is one force which is very often over-looked: With the enough cash and enough skilled people, the 'free' market can be brainwashed into buying any damned thing industry feels like selling them. They can sell millions of gallons of black fizzy water in red cans and make people think they actually like it. They can sell twice as many razor blades forever if they can somehow just convince women that body hair is 'dirty'. --They can make people buy oil at $100 a barrel if they can sell people the right war. --This aspect of the 'Free Market' is never mentioned in the sermons, and the reason is that it blows the theory so full of holes that it sinks back to its natural, un-inflated level of importance. Because supply and demand do indeed have an effect on how stuff works; but it's not a hard and fast rule which will bring humanity into some kind of free-market nirvana where we can all stop thinking and rest easy on our pre-fab sound-biten economic theories.
If we do that, then we might just as well be having seizures while speaking in tongues.
-FL
It's great that this has discrete graphics, but does anyone honestly expect this to do much when it's running a low-power single-core CPU like Atom? I love the idea of a netbook that can play games, but a single-core Atom is just not up to snuff. It might be worth a look if they threw in one of the new dual-core Diamondvilles, but these things are even underpowered for some flash games.
That it can't do 720p video when my EEE 900 can using mplayer. The biggest problem I encounter is that it gets glitchy at times because the SSD can't keep up...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
They stopped calling them 'laptops' in favor of 'notebooks' years ago for precisely this reason. Granted I'm typing this from a MBP that's doing a fine job to keep my nuts warm (through a blanket so I don't actually burn my legs), but the computer industry has long since accepted that the devices almost universally are too hot to be marketed as a laptop computer.
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
Powerful introduction, but a touch weak on the finish. Nice reinforcement of their promiscuity with the copulative verb. This post failed to reach its potential, some homosexual references and threats may have helped here.
Disappointing. Two stars.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
For me a netbook is also defined by it's pricetag. If it's cheap enough you don't get worried of thieves, you can take it everywhere. If it ever gets lost, there's no $2000 (vaio) gone.
Atari rules... ermm... ruled.
I'm not sure what you consider funny about the idea of gaming laptops. You go home and you use it the same way you use a desktop, by hooking up an external keyboard, mouse and monitor. If you are in a mobile environment, then you sacrifice the monitor and keyboard, but in that situation you wouldn't play at all with a desktop. Most gaming laptops have a 17 inch high resolution monitor, better keyboards and are overkill for playing WoW. This model is not a common configuration.
Originally notebooks were small form-factor laptops. Any laptop smaller than an A4 paper pad was called a notebook. Netbook is a trademark owned by Psion (or whoever bought Psion) and using it for cheap x86 machines is just plain wrong.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Actually if you check my post just above you'll see that Dell still call them laptops - and you don't get much bigger or more common than Dell when it comes to home computing..
which is totally what she said
You would really think that they could be able to power down enough of the 9300M to compare with the 945. But I guess they did the math and it makes sense to include two separate graphics controllers?
Well, that's even more weird because the current tendency is to put the same brand of chip both on the mother board *AND* on the discrete GFX card. So that the discrete chip and the motherboard chip can collaborate in SLI / CrossFire when the extra power is needed instead of one of the two sitting idle. (Called Hybrid CrossFire and PowerXpress by ATI, and Hybrid SLI by nVidia)
Seems like a pain to have to reboot to play games... but I guess I already do that between Debian/Windows. :-/
It's even more weird as usually the same-brand chipset+GPU combination tend to have driver support for on-the-fly switch between chipset-only and SLI/Crossfire chipset+GPU modes, which would have made it look a tad less like a hack. /. are already rebooting between Windows and Linux for games anyway).
(Sadly its only supported in the binary drivers, so its only in Windows or proprietary BLOBs. Not in RadeonHD and Nouveau. But as you said,
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I was able to use the keyboard on a Psion 5 (and before that a 3) with no problems. OK, I have smll hands but there was guy in my office who had hands like bunches of bananas and he had no problems either.
For me something like the EEE falls between two stools - it's big enough that it needs a bag (the Psion would fit in a suit jacket or cargo pants) so at that point you might as well go for a bigger one that's more usable.
Now if there was an EEE-alike that could also be used as a tablet, that I might consider for occasional home use.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There is plenty evidence showing the current problem is from government intervention in getting banks to make loans to people that are overly risky.
Okay, did you actually, really just try to blame the current economic crisis on people who didn't follow the strictures of the 'Free Market' obediently enough?
That is the most bugged-out bit of spin-doctored delusional insanity I've heard today, --and it's pushing 1 o'clock, so I've already heard a ton of bullshit! "Government intervention in getting banks to make loans to people".?????
Twist that sucker! Make it sing the tune you want!
--Because, you are right! There was government intervention. But the intervening act was to remove intervention. See there? Double-negative. Because it was in fact an act of Deregulation carried out under the aegis of "Free Market Capitalism." --The government deliberately prevented states from exercising their existing regulatory laws which would have punished the banks for predatory lending! In true psychopathic style, Bush-co deliberately set up the housing crisis time bomb by preventing regulation of the mortgage market so that lower level sociopaths could move in and screw people. Attorneys general from 50 states all protested a blue streak, but Bush-co ignored them, and blind worshippers of the 'Free Market' were so brainwashed that they actually cheered! Eliot Spitzer does a good job in clarifying the legal gymnastics used to perpetrate the home lending mess.
So, just to be very clear and leave no allowance for wiggle-room, you had that one backwards. Re-do.
The idea of a "free market", what it is, what it means, and how it works, is much older than the Bush and Reagan presidencies. IIRC the modern idea traces back to the 1700s in England. It is not a belief or a religion. It is the historically proven most effective way for people to organize and be productive.
Now hold on. It is a "Historically proven most effective way for people to organize"? Except, you don't have to actually believe in it or follow any sort of philosophy in order to organize yourself accordingly? So how do you know if you're doing it right? --Because you can obviously do it 'wrong', otherwise people wouldn't exist to gush on about it with such fervor, (you've heard them. I suspect you might even BE one of them). --And there wouldn't be a Bush-co to fight for 'right' way of doing things. Oh, and let's not forget that the 'Free Marekt' belief system isn't really there. The Free Market is just the 'way' things are. It's like magic, and by gum they'll tie your hands behind your back if you don't believe in it with the same certainty that they deign proper!
Pardon me, but that's EXACTLY like a religion. The fact that it's based on an actual principal (supply and demand) doesn't change the fact that it has ballooned into a belief system.
And, yeah, I know it's origins go further back than Reagan. But with generational gaps and new preachers, you get updated and newly energized versions of the same old sermons. That's all I was referring to.
Every other system has either not worked or been markedly less effective. I hope the connection between the incredible increase in productivity and lives saved in countries with relatively free markets is understood by you.
Oh just stop it with that. That's a tired old chestnut, and not even you truly believe it, otherwise you wouldn't have dropped in that, 'relatively' qualifier. I live in Canada, which has a lot more regulation than the U.S., and having traveled extensively in both countries over the last couple of decades, I can tell you that I'm damned happy to have a maple leaf on my passport. --Those portions of the U.S. where they refuse to regulate things are just plain screwed up and unfit for human life. Regulation very simply doesn't mean So
Ah, very nice features, but.... does it come with Microsoft documents, source code, software serials and keygens?! Mine did!!! Now to re-dub Balmer's Windows 3.1 (or whatever version it was) commercial to include these must-have features!
My wife has an expensive Vaio with a true 8-bit screen. She laughes at my other notebooks with the dark tiny graphics which just suck for games or even using ms word for extended periods of time.
Does this unit have a true 8-bit screen or is it a 6-bit screen which emulates 8 bit in software that creates a bad picture?
Is it even possible to even buy a true notebook with 8bit graphics anymore? I want to know as her vaio is dying and I am looking to replace it.
8-bit is essential for any game. Any environment with light can make a screen too dark to play on.
http://saveie6.com/
Thanks to the magic of VNC and X11 over SSH and the interweb my $600 NZ netbook has access to my white hot 3GHz core duo desktop at home. I browse, e-mail, chat and configure switches over a USB/Serial adapter, but I do everything else for work over a citrix connection, and for all my personal stuff over SSH tunnel to my home desktop. 8)
As long as I have net, I have all the power I need for $600.
For games I have an XBox.
very light computer and this makes more mobile http://www.notebookspot.com/