Choosing between E-350 and C-50/C-60? Get in here!

I just did 2 benchmarks with the E-350 and the C-50/C-60. I have posted them below. If you didn't already know, some notebook manufacturers are allowing you to gain a 1.3GHz turbo boost feature (C-60) if your notebook has a C-50 via a BIOS update and Catalyst 11.7. Also, your GPU clock will be raised to 400MHz (6290) instead of the standard 280MHz (6250).

I am still fairly new to making videos, so please, post any positive/negative criticism here.

E-350 vs C-50/C-60 APU 1080p video test - YouTube

E-350 vs C-50/C-60 CPU and Graphics performance test - YouTube

 

I wouldn't touch the E-350. Had it for about a week; it did not have enough CPU power to playback Netflix and Hulu if the hardware acceleration feature did not actually work. Decent amount of stuttering on mine. Supposedly my HTPC setup had HWA enabled so maybe I'm wrong and it just sucks period, but I'd like to give it the benefit of the doubt. Maybe after all the software kinks and whatnot are worked out it would be fine, but I would not bet on it until someone else has done significant testing a few months down the line. One YouTube video just shows that there's one circumstance and one setup that appears to have no trouble....but that's one data point showing that maybe it'll work out in the future.

Other than that I'm sure it's a fine platform, but once again I question AMD's value / performance in the market.

EDIT: I just realized that was your video. Not a question in general. That's Netflix right? Try hitting Ctrl+Shift+Alt+D to view stats (framerate, CPU usage, etc) without having to deal with any software overhead introduced by FRAPS.

 

That's weird. I use Netflix all the time on my dm1z and it works perfectly. I'm not sure what Hulu is though.

E-350 is pretty good though if you are using it for school. I finally have a netbook which I can take to school and use pretty much all the time and still have enough battery to watch 2 movies when I come home.

 

Personally, I disagree, given my experiences with my X120e for the last half year. 1080p videos play beautifully on it (YouTube and downloaded content--I'll test Hulu sometime soon), just as smoothly as on my T500. Gaming performance isn't all too bad either, although raw CPU power is the Achilles' heel. I wouldn't say there's no difference between general usage, but overall snappiness is almost imperceptibly different between the X120e and the T500, with SSDs and 4GB of RAM in both machines.

I think part of the reason for this is that hardware acceleration support seemed very good to me, with AMD's 11.7 drivers.

The value of the AMD Zacate machines is pretty good when you can find discounted pricing. At $350, my X120e was truly a steal in my opinion: for the general-purpose user, it offers 100% of the functionality in a very portable package with pretty good battery life.

 

Might be a drivers issue, or system specific issue. I just know my Gigabyte E350-USB sucked, and there were plenty of people complaining about it too. Maybe the software bugs have finally be worked out, or maybe the fact that the dm1z's lack of a 1080p screen makes a difference.

It's also entirely possible that 11.7 made all the difference; they were not out when I bought and subsequently returned my system.

For basic school stuff it's definitely got enough power to get you through the day but not through anything requiring higher performance.

 

Besides, most if not all of us have a gaming rig for games and 1080p video.

Also, I output 1080p video via HDMI out. Still looks absolutely amazing on my 42 inch TV.

 

Gotcha. I'd definitely be interested in those CPU utilization numbers with 11.7 installed.

 

They are 2 different class APU's, E-350/E-450s is cream of the crop for Zacate, and Cx0 is entry level Ontario chips. I have used the E-350 and it is definitely up to par for normal Windows 7 usage, of course you are not doing CAD or rendering on it, but performance is similar for ULV Core 2 chips. And graphics wise kicks Intel's behind a fair amount. My friend's x120e was able to play Amnesia and Source games at native resolution.

 

Thanks for posting your videos.

I tested an ASUS netbook with an AMD C-30 processor this spring:
ASUS Eee PC 1015b Review
It's a poor excuse for a modern processor. It could not even play back a YouTube video smoothly. The E-350 doesn't sound too bad on the other hand, but I have no experience with one.
And regarding hardware acceleration - if it doesn't "just work", period, without me doing anything, it's worthless.

I don't know how much better the C-50 is than the C-30, but I can't imagine all that much ...

 

o.0 I'm going to say, I've never had a problem with HW acceleration in flash working on AMD GPU, nVidia and Intel GPU, on the other hand, tend to do some funny things to the IE9 flash plugin and the FF/Chrome flash addon.

 

in the review it is listed with the C-30 which is single core

 

Wouldn't it be better to hold off for a month when the E-450 is released to get clearance E-350's for a lot less?

 

Ah yeah the C30 is the single core, the C50 is the dual. I'd be cautious of buying a computer with either processor, TBH.

 

Though dual core > single core. I had a Neo single core dv2 laptop before. Yuck! Even an Intel N270 n10j ran better than that! Not to mention, the HD3410 Mobility probably has no real UVD functionality, since it rarely worked properly, once I got to blurays, it choked, making the bluray drive I got with it useless...

 

Could anyone say in detail, what are the power consumption / battery life differences in the c50/c60 and E-350 ?

 

C-50 in my tablet does everything that's not gaming as well as I'd need it to. This includes playing a 1080p mp4 Blu-Ray rip over HDMI this Thanksgiving. With OpenCL in Vegas Pro 11, I've even done a bit of very light video work on it. It's slow, especially with 2gb of RAM, but it's not impossible.

 

I updated my Acer 522 bios and my AMD driver to the 12.1 beta yet it hasn't boosted the C-50's CPU speed.

Am I missing something?

 

Does adobe flash player work with the C-60 as it`s only 1.3GHz when the abobe website says minimum requirements is 1.6GHz

Thanks

John.

 

How about the E450 is that a step up or just nudge up?

 

Brazos has some issues with Silverlight for whatever reason, so Netflix suffers horribly. Not sure if it was ever fixed. Owned an HP DM1z with E-450 for a short while, but HD Netflix would stop and stutter like crazy. But Flash HD or just a ripped/compressed HD would work just fine. Still own an Asus Eee 1215b with E-350 that works fine, hasn't gotten that much use, but will have to check to see if Netflix is fixed with latest drivers and/or Silverlight update.

 

Actually it's not AMD's fault when it comes to Netflix. Netflix uses Silverlight but they didn't enable Hardware Acceleration hence why you had no problem with normal flash HD content.
If you google the problem you will see there are countless topics on forums about this issue.

 

I have found a work around that seems to work so far for netflix, its not the best but at least it allows you to watch without the studdering and audio/video syncing issues. in your browser after signing into netflix go to www.netflix.com/videoquality and select better. After doing this i was able to watch an entire episode of star trek voyager with no issues at all. this should work for any pc that is having trouble with the hd decoding. let me know if this works for you.

I just yesterday purchased an acer aspire one 722, having owned a netbook based off the atom n270 before i never gave any thought to using netflix as that one seemed to work just fine. upon loading up the page i was met with a ton of lag spikes, studdering, and audio/video sync issues. i looked into this and it seems that the silverlight needed to use netflix will not use the hardware accel. even when told to, this problem is present on most of the intel atoms and from what i can tell all of the lower end amd apus including the e350/450 and the e1-1200/1800. it would appear that to play netflix hd you need at least an amd a4 or better in a notebook. I have a toshiba with the amd a6 quad w/ 6gb ram and it works fine. at any point this seems to at least allow you to watch netflix on your netbook/notebook (i did not test this with hdmi). as for my netbook specs,

amd c60 1.0 ghz turbo 1.33
4gb ddr3 ram 10600
stock 320gb hdd
amd 6290 gpu

 

I'm aware of it as I probably contributed to many of those topics. Just that there was never any fix from AMD nor Netflix. In any case, the solution by kyoten is decent, but it gets back to quality, at "better" it's likely not HD, just slightly better SD, lol. Anyhow, good luck. The E-350/E-450 are great CPU's otherwise.