ASUS Eee PC 1201N On Linux

The battery-power-usage test profile generated the above graph. As you can see, the Samsung NC10 is a lot more energy efficient than the ASUS Eee PC 1201N. This test profile tests the systems by letting them idle for one minute followed by allowing them to idle for another minute but for this additional 60 seconds when it has signaled the display panel to turn off via Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS), and then the rest of the time is spent with the panel lit back up and playing back a 1080p sample video file using MPlayer with X-Video acceleration. The Samsung NC10 had averaged a power consumption rate of 11.86 Watts while the 32-bit version of Ubuntu averaged 16.39 Watts and the 64-bit Ubuntu was at 15.88 Watts. The ASUS Eee PC 1201N had consumed about 33% more power than the Samsung NC10, but its hardware is vastly different with the Intel Atom 330, 12.1" display, and NVIDIA ION graphics. The least amount of power that the Samsung NC10 went through was 7.8 Watts while the Eee PC 1201N had bottomed out at 13.2 Watts when the display was off via DPMS.

During the battery-power-usage test profile, we also monitored the system temperature through the Phoronix Test Suite with its ACPI hooks. Not only did the Samsung NC10 go through much less energy than the 1201N, but it also ran significantly cooler. The average system temperature for the NC10 netbook was 44 degrees but for Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 on the 1201N it was at 58 degrees and even hotter with the 32-bit version at 62 degrees. Running above 60 degrees during this simple idling/video playback testing is very warm.

When running with the ASUS Eee PC 1201N, the Phoronix Test Suite was also able to automatically monitor the GPU temperature too through the NV-CONTROL extension interface for the ION GPU. The ION graphics processor's temperature had not fluctuated much, but during this time, it was running comfortably at around 52 degrees Celsius.