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:

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Another Aspire One, from Acer – 571 with Vmedia Blu Ray

The chassis is based on the D150 or D250. It also shares the same internal specifications, but has some additional components. The screen size is 10.1″ still, but the resolution was increased to 1280×720 with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The Intel Atom N280 however cannot reliably decode H.264 or HD video in general at that resolution, that’s why it’s supported by the Quartics Q1721 Multimedia Coprocessor. It does accelerate decoding and encoding(!) of H.264 and other codecs, and also adds hardware scaling and filtering.

Another addition is quite unusual. Acer added an optical disc drive; Vmedia, uses 32mm Blu-ray discs, loaded inside tiny plastic cartridges, each with 1GB capacity.  In the case of the 571, they load into the left-hand side of the palmrest; initially only ROM discs full of media content will be available, with 576p-quality video content, but the company promises recordable versions at some point in the future.

To deal with that media, and keep up with the 1280 x 720 display, the Aspire One 571 pairs its Intel Atom N280 1.66GHz processor with the Quartics Q1721 Multimedia Coprocessor.  That can handle hardware decoding/encoding of H.264 and other HD video formats, meaning the netbook might actually be a realistic media processing companion.

Source: macles.blogspot.com

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