14 DAY TRIAL // Just a short while after they were officially introduced, Intel's Pine Trail platforms were benchmarked and evaluated by testers over at HotHardware and PCMag. The Pine Trail and Pineview were highly anticipated products, especially considering the high rise in popularity of mobile computers over the past year. The test results may, however, turn out to be rather less glorious than expected, as neither the nettop nor the netbook platform can brag about a drastic performance increase compared to existing competing devices. Still, even though they didn't win all performance tests, the platforms did completely overshadow their competition when it came to power efficiency.
The nettop platform Intel D510 whitebox was tested by the PCMag team who used an Atom D510 processor, Intel NM510 Express chipset, a 250GB 7,200rpm SATA hard drive, 1GB of DDR2-800 memory, a DVD drive, and a 60W power supply. The end results showed that the “older” Atom 330 ran just as well.
This means that the owners of 330-based nettops don't have any real reason to upgrade their systems, although new purchasers should definitely select the Pine Trail because of its low noise output and significant decrease in power consumption. More specifically, the newly released platform is completely fanless and doesn't use up more than 19W even under full workloads.
The result was quite similar for the netbook platform, which was tested by the team over at HotHardware. The testers compared the ASUS Eee PC 1005PE against the older Atom and even the Ion from NVIDIA and found that the older N270 was definitely surpassed in terms of processing power. Still, the integrated graphics was proven to be unable to compete with NVIDIA's Ion.
Nevertheless, Pine Trail bested its competitors quite handily in terms of power efficiency (the model tested lasted for seven hours on battery power) and thus, according to the testers, the new technology is expected to perform more than satisfactory on netbooks. The only more noticeable downside of the Eee PC 1005PE consisted of some difficulties when handling media files, especially when attempting video decoding.
It seems that the latest release from Intel may have not delivered anything astounding in terms of performance, but the low-power usage definitely makes it a better choice than Intel's previous netbook and nettop platforms.