Netbook GAMING?
Posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 and filed under Fun Stuff.I’ve recently decided to sell my LAN box and in it’s place buy a new EEEPC 1000HE. Over the past few years, I’ve begun to do less PC gaming, more console gaming, and strayed away from larger machines. So I was after something very small and inexpensive with great battery life. The new 1000HE met all of these criteria; 10.1″ screen, Intel Atom N280, 160gb hard drive, upgradeable to 2gb of memory, weight around 3 lbs with the battery. Straight out of the box I swapped in a 2gb ram chip, installed Windows 7 and began tweaking it to my liking. I must say it’s very impressive for having only cost me $395 in total. It multitasks well, runs Aero, allows me to browse the web, and use chat programs, but how well does it game? Well as expected, it lacks in that department. The Intel 945 chipset isn’t known for mind blowing performance. However I did some research and discovered some very helpful tips and tools that have drastically increased framerates and allowed me to run games that would not run previously.
First: Download modded graphics drivers for the chipset, or manually mod them yourself if you’re savvy. They can be found at the link below along with everything else I am covering.
(http://intel9xx.moonfruit.com/)
Second: Download GMAbooster. By this point you should already see a performance increase.
Third: Overclock the N280 using SetFSB. In today’s world, overclocking is a simple task even for those who aren’t as tech-inclined as others. My 1000HE is currently clocked at 1.83ghz, up from the stock 1.67ghz ,with very little increase in heat or loss of battery life.
To run a few games that wouldn’t run under normal circumstances, use 3DAnalyze. There are other emulation programs discussed as well at the link I posted. These tools and tips are not exclusive to the EEEPC, one can use them on any netbook or laptop with the Intel 9XX chipset. On a side note, ReadyBoost works very well in Windows 7 with the 1000HE. I’m using a 4gb USB drive fully dedicated and I have a noticeable increase in application launch speed. If all you really wanted to know was, does WoW run well on a netbook? The answer is YES.
-Christian
