Eee PC 1215n Performance

This is by design -- it's to prevent the battery from overcharging, it may or may not be mentioned in your manual, but it's common behavior across all ASUS machines to stop charging at 95%. I think if you turn the machine off and charge it it may end up charging closer to 100%.

 

hi there,
okay, the punkbuster problem is also for the alienware netbook so does anyone of you know how to (temporarily) switch off the onboard grafik chip to be able to play battlefield 2142 and try to play battlefield bc?

 

what is the max ram used in this netbook? im considering it against the acer 1551. i would of gone for the 1015pn but the 1gb ram thing is well of a turn off.
if the 1215n is only 2gb max the what is the max on the asus vx6?

 

The max ram of this netbook is 4gb which is the same as the vx6.

Update:
I tried the latest verde drivers and they don't yeild any noticable performance increase unlike the last beta.
Manuel G on the nvidia forum said that he would pass my findings onto the optimus team for investigation (low gpu utilisation and artifacting in some games). I didn't have any hopes for this release since it was pretty soon after any issues had been reported and they obviously need time to reproduce it all so maybe in the next release we may see some improvement.

Regardless of the Pcie bottleneck in this machine there are other factors limiting performance and good optimus drivers are one of them... if we can get that sorted out then we can see how bad the processor and the bottleneck is.

 

They will sort it out. asus vx6 is going to be there more popular netbook with optimus but a few thatNEEDS to have this fixed. otherwsie it be like using a lamborghini shell and a ford engine. and THATS false advertising. so those drivers will get fixed.

 

Thanks oogamar for your hard work. Please continue to post updates as you find them, as there are a lot of people eager to se improvements on this issue

 

If you want an increase in performance then getting a solid state drive would relatively be a much, much better investment.

I just contacted Asus about my current HDD, which is really noisy. Not sure whether there is an issue with it, or whether it's Asus trying to save money by fitting crap quality drives into their 1215n's - but I've asked them to look at it and either get me a new HDD or replace it with an SSD. Now waiting to hear from an advisor, because she wasn't sure if an upgrade was possible.

Does anyone else think their HDD is really noisy?

 

My really makes some cracking sounds from time to time, not that disturbing for me actually, but still uncomfortable and creepy.
SSD is cool, but having a hdd-capacity version (128Gb+) is really costly, here those cost about half of the netbook itself, and for such multimedia oriented machine 128Gb is far not much.

 

The reason the hdd is noisey is because it's constantly waking itself up from a sleep state which it goes in automatically to save power... it's the same in most netbooks with hdds.
I remeber reading about a little program someone wrote to stop it going into sleep state called quietHDD or something. If it bugs you i suggest you google it but for me it's not a huge issue and i'd rather have the extra battery life.

 

I've tried it, but it doesn't really help much. I always though that it was caused by a combination of Windows cache and a really crappy hard drive.

 

Well theres that aswell which does cause a fair bit of noise. The quiethdd program was to stop the absurdly loud click and stutter that sometimes happens - the thread in the eee user forum stated that this was a big issue on the 1201n. If this machine had an SSD then it would be perfect but i personally can't justify spending more money on this "budget"machine.

 

What form factor is the HDD anyway? 2.5 inch?

I just got an answer from asus saying that fitting a SSD would require motherboard upgrade. Not sure if that's the case or if they are simply making excuses.

 

Its a lie... someone has already done it and it's a 2.5" yeah.

EeeUser Forum / 1215N - Hard Drive Swap with Pics!

 

Hey 1215N users, are any of you having difficulty activating Optimus, or otherwise switching between integrated graphics and ION?

I just received my 1015PN, upgraded to Win 7 Home Premium, and have found that the Asus Graphics Switch program can't turn on Optimus mode--the 1015PN is just stuck in ION mode, perpetually. Even if I select Optimus mode, it still prompts me to restart on Win 7 Home Premium, and when I do, it restarts with ION on anyway.

I noticed there being a similar problem mentioned on page 7 of this thread, but the solution that worked for one user--downloading something from Windows Update--seems to be evading me since Windows Update is telling me there's nothing more to be updated on this computer.

I posted this in another thread for the 1015PN, but I'm not sure that many people have one yet--at least, no one that seems to be having my issue--so answers there might be pretty rare. If any of you 1215N users have any insights or solutions though, I'd greatly appreciate hearing them.

 

Noticed some odd switching between ac mode and battery as I was doing some calc homework. Pulled out the power plug to see what was up and there's my answer. The pin that's supposed to be on the computer is wedged in the ac cord. I've only had this for a month.. .

Anyhow, anyone ever had to deal with asus warranty and customer service? I assume they'll have me send it back, then like 3 weeks later send me it fixed? Problem is that I really can't afford to go even a week without a laptop... suggestions?

This is just retarded. I was deciding between the m11x or the 1215... regret my decision now

 

The new 260.99 drivers are out and i've tried them. Performance does seem a bit better (around 10% more fps in general). I've only tried the arkham asylum demo, crysis warhead and starcraft 2. Unfortunately Starcraft is still unplayable at this moment in time due to crazy lag and artifacting.

 

@oogamar: I'm picking up this laptop tomorrow, you mentioned that SC2 is unplayable? But I've seen youtube videos of people being able to run SC2 on their 1215n... fingers crossed it actually works or I'd be majorly disappointed.

 

It seems to vary playability wise - the second to last patch made the game not load at all for me but the latest patch seemed to fix that. All of the drivers for this device so far have had varying results, some improved performance but introduced artifacts and some performed just plain bad. I do believe that eventually all these issues can be ironed out but for the moment it's not really an enjoyable experience.

 

@oogamar: Thanks for the reply, hmm...I do hope it gets ironed out and I'm pretty sure it would, since it's nvidia's problem and not Asus.

Does anyone know if there's an improvement in battery life with SSD installed?

 

FYI, the nVidia Control Panel for the new 260.99 Verde driver has a View option "Display GPU Activity Icon in Notification Area" Default is OFF. Turn this on if you want to continuously check ION activity via the Desktop notifications. You can also directly access the "customize ION support" part of the nVidia Control Panel via this notification icon.

 

Nice, but according to oogamar SC2 is unplayable? I probably can't live without that...

 

I got this netbook. I can still play SC II. 1366x768 resolution. Textures on medium (the looks turn to cartoony if you set it on low) with fps difference from 25 when base building. To 7 FPS when attacking opponent base with loads of mobs. I am going to try to overclock my CPU and GPU a little bit so that the 7 FPS will be around 10-15 FPS which is more then enough for me.

 

Let me just clarify what i mean by unplayable:

Problems with all drivers so far:

1. Cutscenes in campaign are unwatchable and crash or just blackout
2. Performance is around 60% of what it should be (except one of the drivers which yielded a big fps boost which has disappeared since 260.61 beta).

Problems with the latest drivers:

1. Poor performance
2. Whenever a unit opens fire the ground around the battle distorts, flickers and performance slows to a crawl until it finally blacks out.

There are drivers that do allow you to play a skirmish or a small 1v1 online game (the stock drivers do) however performance is very poor late game when theres 2 decent bases and an average army.

Yes the gpu architecture is old and therefore drivers shouldn't be having these issues. However it's the first time that this card has been put in such a low power system with limited pcie bandwidth and with an optimus configuration.

No doubt that eventually as the popularity of the ng-ion system grows that we will see better drivers that show the true performance and stability.

 

LOL by then they will have newer netbooks with better cpus....maybe even with ion 3 lol. That is if they cant get the drivers right for ion nd have to redo it on a next gen.
So i just bought an acer 1551 k625 despite that im quite envious of the ion all the same. But i needed the cpu more i guess for football manager 2011. And the thought of waiting for drivers would irritate me when i want all the performance from the machine made me pick acer.

 

I've received my unit and played around with it for 2 days.

The only minor issues I have with this machines are:
(1) Heaps of keyboard flex at the center
(2) HDD constantly making clicking noises
(3) Multi touch wasn't as responsive as I hoped it would it

Regards to nvidia drivers, I heard SC2 won't run properly with 260.xx drivers, however I decided to stick with 260.99 mainly because with 258.96, ion is constantly on due to dwm.exe (windows aero effect).

I was so keen to try SC2 and grabbed the DVD box the second I arrived home with this netbook..... but forgot that there isn't a DVD drive LOL. How did everyone else install SC2? Did you download the ISO or create ISO from DVD.

 

Most blizzard games don't have files that need to be edited in regedit. with this in my mind I just shared the SC II folder on my main pc. And copied it to my 1215n. You can also just put the folder on an external drive. (got that for WoW)

 

@Gkomega: Thanks, I used ImgBurn to make an image of SC2 and installed it without any issues. I've kept an SC2 folder in my external HDD though, awesome idea.

258.96 caused a bit of lag later on in SC2 so I tried 257.41 which gave a constant 18-20 fps and everything is a lot smoother. Definitely recommend this driver and surprisingly it's newer than the 258.

 

Np. although I am a bit suprised that you say that you get 18-20 FPS. Mainly @ the start of the game I am able to get 20-24 fps. after a while with around 30 workers on the map i drop to 18-22. and finally when I start attacking with 30+ mobs I will drop to 7-15 FPS. That is why I hope there will be some better drivers that give me also those 15-20 fps later ingame. 7 FPS is not cool
I use 257.34 as ION drivers.

 

I have had the same Starcraft 2 results as Gkomega, and was wondering if adding more ram would help get my frame rate up a little. I know the max ram it will allow you to have is less than 3gb, so it wouldn't be that much of an increase but I wonder if you would see any noticeable difference. What do you think?

 

If the system werent riddled by other bottlenecks (pciex1, poor cpu, bad drivers) then you might see a difference (a small difference mind you). On these low settings memory isn't really an issue. Buying new ram would be a waste of money at the moment.

 

My little brother has considered getting one of these 1215N, but it seems the performance isn't as great, well the fps for COD series aren't so good compared to his Hp Mini 311c

@oogamer is the D525 @ 2.21ghz stable and won't melt durning long term like leaving it on all day and stuff? I may consider overclocking my little brother 1215N if he still considers buying it.

Thanks, Philo

 

Hi Philo, yes that overclock is stable for day long use. I had it up to 2.3 for benchmarking but that crashed after an hour or so. The temperatures never get high on this machine... stay's cool all the time.

 

I just installed the latest GPU driver from NVIDIA's website and now when my computer goes into sleep mode it won't wake up, as in the screen will not turn back on. How do I fix this?

 

With the same overclock as Oogamar I run Civ5 without any problems, DeathSpank, Torchlight, World of Warcraft ...

And a "tank fps" multiplayer game called World of Tanks at around 25 fps .

Very nice little machine this.

Still wondering if I should try to put a SSD in there, cause I'm scared to break the casing.

 

has anyone had any luck with COD Black Ops?

 

I have an odd question, that I'm hoping you guys might be able to help me out with. I'm trying to figure out what games I might want to run on my next laptop, one possibility of which is the 1215N. In doing research, I realized that it actually might be better suited for games than my current laptop, a Macbook White. I think the Macbook has a better processor (Core 2 Duo), but it's running the 9400M as opposed to the Ion 2 found in the 1215N.

So I'm wondering - I have XP installed on this Macbook - would that be a viable surrogate to figure out what games might be viable on the 1215N? Or does the difference in CPU make enough difference that it's not a good study? I only have 2 GB Ram in here, so I think everything else should be pretty comparable, right?

I'm not trying to run anything major, but there are a couple of games that are new-ish, with custom graphic libraries (Amnesia: The Dark Descent) that I'm curious as to whether they'd run on the 1215N. This would alleviate a lot of my problems if it was a viable comparison.

Thanks.

 

It's a good thought in theory, but I would just stick with the fps and performance info on here. I have found that they are accurate, because I own an 1215n and have seen the results. I don't think you can really get comparable results from using a Macbook and trying to simulate the 1215n.

 

^ I have to agree, the results may be similar or very different because while in theory the gpu is better in the 1215n it i limited by the pcie bottleneck which is potentially very damaging to performance and also the weak processor in the 1215n.

The results may be better or far worse than the macbook depending on the game and how the pcie bandwidth is used in each case and how reliant on gpu or cpu power each scene in each game is. There are too many variables to draw comparisons.
However i will say that if you were to take out the pcie bandwidth as a factor the performance should be similar to the macbook. But as this limitation is there it will be very hit and miss in comparison.

 

Hows your battery life with the overclock? Has much percentage wear out? I just ordered the asus 1215n for my little brother, also is the overclock less stable now due to the new drivers?

Also can you provide me the stable temperature for the GPU and CPU should be at, so I can monitor it for my little brother as he doesn't care about the temperature. In Fahrenheit or Celsius!

And how much ram are you left with after you start up the asus 1215n? Like 1.2gb ram left for free or?? Thanks.

Regards,
Philo

 

Battery life with the overclock under normal usage isn't that much less at all perhaps 10-15mins max however i only normally overclock when running a game and under overclocked full gaming conditions i still get around 2.5-3 hours of full performance.
The new drivers dont effect the overclock but the new bios do. I suggest you steer clear of the new system bios until the next update.

Temperature wise the components are no different to most other components on the market - i.e. the cpu has a thermal limit of 100C and the gpu is around 120C.
Even under extreme overclocking i have never seen the gpu go above 66C and the cpu never seems to go above the mid/high 40's.
This thing runs really cool - even under stress, so i don't see heat being a problem.

RAM-wise you are left with between 900mb-1200mb depending on how much stuff you have installed.

 

oogamer,
Which BIOS version are you running? Thanks for all the good input on this great 'lil netbook

 

Im currently running the latest 0503 bios available from the asus site. I recommend to avoid this bios if you want to overclock as overclocking with this bios causes lockups and stuttering.

 

Is it possible to go back to the previous version if you've already upgraded to 0503?

 

Yes if you can track down the original bios... unfortunately i haven't been able to find them anywhere.

 

Hi, I have a problem with setfsb. I have latest 0503 bios and when i overclocked CPU up to 2GHz i lost my LAN connection (maximum I can get is 114MHz on FSB).. it looks like the LAN chipset couldn't handle the overclocked bus frequency, but don't understand it because you don't have this problems and chipsets in 1215N should be the same.. or not?

And other thing.. I know that some other eee PCs have bios setting for super hybrid engine, changing the frequency in super performance mode up to 30%.. so i thinking if it isn't any way to change the settings for super hybrid engine on 1215N, but i don't find any informations about it.
Or if it wouldn't be possible to flash that bios into 1215N? ..but it would be comlpete nonsence, don't know how different are these netbooks and their motherboards.
Anyway it's nice to imagine that we could change the value for super hybrid engine up to 30% (eq 2.3GHz), don't need any third party software and have in all under one button.

Finally i'm sorry for my english, don't speak this language for years

 

The latest 0503 bios can cause some weird issues when subjected to overclocking, it seems you have found another one. Do you notice choppy performance and a stuttering mouse aswell or just the LAN issue?

Also the super hybrid engine is coded into the bios and as such it is not editable and bios from other models aren't interchangable between machines and doing so would brick your device.

 

I'm quite certain this is a driver issue.

I'm playing Mirror's Edge on lowest settings, lowest textures and lowest graphical processing (physX disabled ofc), on 640x480....

17fps in a standing scene on loading (in one of the canals.)

So I was like "Well let's see the slideshow that will be when I turn up the details".

I set the resolution to max (1366x768), set textures to highest and graphical processing to medium

20 fps! What?! Much smoother gameplay too!

.... this is _definitely_ not a pci-e bottleneck. That would show if we used antialiasing _or_ if we used resolutions 1680x1050 and up.

<rant>
This is definitely a driver issue. I'm just hoping they'll do something about it very soon, because it just seems to me like 1201eee has much better performance, even though due to the lack of optimus its battery life is worse.

Nvidia - you said that the Next-gen ION is better even if it uses more or less the same components.

Here's a deal - prove it!

</rant>

Anyway, can someone else tell me - can 1201 users play CoD:MW2 (first level or even the training ground?)

Because I can't. I mean.. yeah I can, but the fps goes from 30 to like 5 sometimes.

And I saw youtube vids of people playing it but I can't trust those.

EDIT:

I did some more testing, overclocked the card and all, and I found out that:
in Mirror's Edge:

Resolution - has either no, or very weird impact (slower rendering and choppier gameplay in lower resolutions!)
Texture size - No impact whatsoever. Maybe 1-2fps.
Graphics quality - Minimal impact. 2-5fps difference between "highest" and "lowest" settings.

I can play the game with highest textures and medium graphics quality (with 1366x768 resolution) with averagely 18-20 fps. It's quite playable and enjoyable (though believe me don't try it on the horrid 1215N touchpad).

 

I have only that LAN issue.. and black screen when restarted or get it wake up.. and have these problems already at older 0203 bios.. maybe I try to find any older versions.
But I think that's really a problem of the LAN chipset, seems to gradually stops working when I incerese the bus frequency. I don't understand much these things, but maybe helps get more current into it.. but i don't know how do do this.

It bothers me quite a bit, because otherwise I get 2 hour stability up to 2.3GHz (130MHz at FSB), temperature around 50 degrees max.
I try to do some benchmarks if it is a big difference between 2 and 2.3GHz, but I think that the Atom was always the weakest part of this machine.

 

Oh and I forgot to add - I tried overclocking the card, and I saw an overall improvement from about 17 to 20 fps in general. Not bad.

Also, I ran GPU-Z during these runs and quick check confirms that even with the lowest settings on 640x480 (and oddly enough, lowest achieved FPS), the gpu was fully stressed - 92-99%.

We need new drivers.

 

Hello

I am considering this model but I am not sure it's fast enough. I don't play games but I edit RAW files in Photoshop. Sometimes the files can be 30MB. However, it's only still images and not motion pictures or 3d animations.
If this model is not good enough, which model would you recommend?

Kind regards
.lars