Video: HP Mini 311 Proves Its Mettle With Games And HD Content
October 9th, 2009 by Meghan J. McDonough
For our review of the HP Mini 311 ($449.99) with Nvidia’s Ion LE graphics chip, we benchmarked the system using our standard tests: 3DMark06 and the benchmark included with Far Cry 2. Impressive as those scores were, readers requested more specific tests, asking us to try out World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, Spore, and other games. If the 311 could handle these, even on a low setting, our readership was prepared to be impressed.
We were pleased to find that the well-designed (to see just how well-designed the HP Mini 311 is, check out our video tour of the hardware) system handled WOW and Spore pretty well. How well? Check the videos below and judge for yourself:
World of Warcraft
Spore
Along with improved gaming power comes the ability to output 1080p HD video. We hooked up the Mini 311 to our Samsung HD television and played the HD trailer for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. We noticed some motion blur but otherwise smooth playback with crisp images. See playback below compared to a non-Ion netbook, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10:
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2 Responses to “Video: HP Mini 311 Proves Its Mettle With Games And HD Content”
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October 11th, 2009 at 7:49 am
You are doing it wrong when it comes to HD video decoding. Quicktime Player’s H.264 software decoder is very much worse than any other H.264 software decoder and pretty much unoptimised. 12FPS is not “relatively smooth”, it’s clearly dropping frames there.
MPC-HC has full support for Ion GPU’s bitstream decoding for H.264. The MPC-HC internal DXVA decoder can decode 1080P very smoothly, fully hardware accelerated by the Ion GPU.
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/DXVASupport.html
December 18th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
Relatively smooth when you’re alone outside… assuming all effects are turned to low. What about when you’re actually IN Stormwind and there’s 100s of players running around casting buffs, dancing, running in circles, etc.?