x100e Review

[GrandMasterKhan]

http://www.starksilvercreek.com/2010/06 ... tness.html

[hmmwv]

"Our X100e had the AMD Turion Neo X2 Dual-Core L625 (1.6GHz, 800MHz, 1MB L2) processor, which as I’ve mentioned is its Achilles heal. While it does offer slightly better performance than a traditional netbook, the increase is so marginal, and the battery life compromise so severe, that it’s stuck in no man’s land: poor battery life, with average performance. Time again, the fan would begin whirring while a Toshiba NB305 next to it would run silently, performing the same operation (web browsing on a flash site). Worse still, to get battery life anywhere close to 3 hours, you have to ratchet down the performance, which makes the X100e positively sluggish. Running on power seems like the best idea, which kind of defeats the purpose."

Really have no idea what this guy is smoking. I guess in his world double the performance is considered "marginal," and being able to browse web, listening to Pandora, and downloading files smoothly for 3 hour 45 minutes is considered "anywhere close to 3 hours."

[control]

Yeah, I thought the nb305 that it mentions would be a lot closer to even my single core amd neo, but looking at some benchmarks, the difference between the neo and the atom is similar between the atom 270 is to the atom 450.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup. ... +Neo+MV-40


Just blows it out of the water.

[think2wice]

In my opinion, not a professional or useful review, but more of another personal take on the X100e - from a pretty bad approach.

1. Processor - L625 should be significantly better than any Atom single core, although depends on what he was doing if he would notice it. Since he sticks on that point the whole review, I would guess he's a biased intel fan. Admittedly I am too, and would have preferred an nVidia Ion platform X100e with a dual core Atom.

2. Screen - Best he can offer is "no complaints"? Likes better contrast of [glossy screened] netbooks, but wants matte finish? Silly. Not much to say about the resolution/sharpness difference compared to cheap netbooks - a major selling point for me.

3. Battery life - assuming his barometer was flash video on wifi web as he noted, I can understand his problem. This is better already if using GPU-enable flash 10.1 (beta) and latest ATi drivers.

4. Keyboard, trackpoint - agreed, great.

5. Build quality - agreed, great.

But really have to call BS on this one: "the anemic AMD processor wheezes and sputters along the way."

Again - silly.

[steinAK]

I've had my x100e for a couple weeks now. Before installing the latest Catalyst ATI drivers, there was OBVIOUS fan usage and heat from basic computer tasks. After the Flash 10.1 install and the Catalyst drivers install, it was an unmistakable difference in heat production and fan usage. Night and day to me.

Literally, the speculation/concern I had about heat, fan and battery issues with the x100e have disappeared overnight. The 8cell battery seems reliable at providing over 4 hours of 'my kind of usage'. That is most satisfactory to me.

I use a 1080p Iron Man 2 trailer to test HD performance. On my old Dell Mini 1010 (HD) I had to tweak, tweak and tweak until finally getting the GMA 500 video chipset to even deliver reasonable playback.

The x100e played the clip much better out of the box BUT it wasn't until I installed the latest Catalyst drivers that I could see how freaking smooth and gorgeous that trailer actually was. And even better, the x100e wasn't cranking out heat like a convection oven. It was, without any doubt, cooler, quieter and definitely improved from the week previous. HUGE difference.

Love this rig, excellent first Thinkpad-class netbook Lenovo!