gatorXXX

June 25, 2009 at 1:00pm

Why would anyone pay for it? Portability and battery life. Sure, you can get a better powered laptop or notebook for a tad more with more goodies, but at the expense of say 4lbs more and much, much worse battery life. The Acer netbook I have now does exactly what my fathers laptop does but his core 2 weighs 3 times more than this netbook and he gets 1:30 hours/min of batt power to my 6:30  hours/min. That can make all the difference in the world.

Tekzel

June 25, 2009 at 10:09am

Are people REALLY still caught up on core clock?  Have you already forgotten the days when the Athlon 64 demolished Intel's best processor in benchmarks at 1ghz lower clock?  Yes, it makes a difference... when comparing the same architecture.  Is your ancient desktop also an Athlon 64 class machine?  Then the comparison is meaningless.

gatorXXX

June 24, 2009 at 10:27am

I agree 1.2GHz seems to be a little slow......but....where you'll see the difference is...

1. 800Mhz system bus, up from 533 in most netbooks. Can use DDR II 800Mhz sodimms i would guess.

2. Non intel proprietary integrated video. ATI's GPU's in notebooks spanks the bejeesus outa intel's.

Just those differences alone make it all worth while. Besides, this 1.6Ghz atom underclocks to 800Mhz when not doing anything extensive and on batt power. And that doesn't take much cause doing anything extensive would bring this thing to it's knees. I would bet that that AMD proc will underclock to 800Mhz as well under same cicumstances. So the performance would be nill unless your using photoshop or rendering video which is one thing you will not be doing with one of these machines.

gatorXXX

June 24, 2009 at 10:09am

I would take this back but I'm past my 14 day return period. I got the AM2+ version of the Phenom II x4 deneb. 3.0 GHz OC'd to 3.4GHz on a DFI Lanparty M2RS, 4GB DDR II 1066 and it blazes!! You won't be sorry!!

gatorXXX

June 24, 2009 at 9:00am

There's no comparison between an AMD desktop chip and an atom. I just bought an Acer Aspire one D150 with the atom 1.6GHz proc, 1GB DDR II (upgraded to 2GB before i even turned it on.), 160GB HD and a 10.1 inch screen. It's ok for a second comp just to surf the net, listen to music and watch movies. Oh, and this sucker came with a 6 cell batt for almost 7 hours of fun! But in NO means is this a desktop replacement. I won't even try to encode video on this thing or even play games. It's just powerful enough. But to be honest, I would have waited for this gateway netbook if I had known it was comming out. Not because it has an AMD proc, but because I don't like giving my money to Intel.