Joanna Stern at Engadget has run the new AMD powered Acer Aspire One 521 through its paces and it is almost everything we hoped it could be. The 1.7GHz AMD cpu and ATI Radeon HD 4225 gpu combination packs a punch that knocks out any comparable netbooks with Atom processors.

Here are the benchmark results when compared with some other standard netbooks:

A 1481 on 3DMark06 isn’t too shabby, even beating the HP Mini 311 with Nvidia Ion’s score of 1386. When it came to playing videos 720 and 1080 played fine on the netbook, even when output to a 40? tv through the hdmi out. Flash videos on youtube played flawlessly for the 720 but with the 1080 setting became jittery at times. Joanna also tried out World of Warcraft and managed 28fps.

Basically this netbook isn’t a gaming rig but handily beats everything else in the category, and multitasking and HD videos are no match for this machine. Here are the full specs: