Review Conclusion of ECS P45GC Intel Atom Dual Core 1.6GHz N330
Bluetooth 22 Sept 2008

Conclusion

Nettop, Net PCs, what ever it's name, it is a Green PC for multimedia needs. The Dual Core Atom tends to pick up the lower power and put two of them into a 8W TDP package to solve the improve the speed when it comes to handling multimedia applications needs.

In our multimedia tests, we threw WMVHD  clips at 1080p clips using classic mediaplayer. The system is more stable and ran the clips better than Atom N270 platforms. It is a pity that till today, Intel or any vendor still uses the old Intel 945GC chipset which was not designed to decode WMVHD. So don't expect it to decode H.264 Blu-Ray titles well.

In our test with the ECS P45GC, we tested the same WMVHD 1080P clip "Step into liquid" using Windows media player classic. The clip plays without problem, and it took an average of around 45-50% of CPU time. On the Intel Atom N270, the CPU utilisatoin was almost 95% to 100% throughout playing back the same clip.

Here is a image to show the realtime cpu utilisation when playing back and how the 2 cores managed it.

 

In conclusion, the ECS P45GC has better multimedia performance than it's predecessor, the older single core cousin. Although it spots a smaller foot print, it is left with a single DIMM slot. The PCIe x1 slot is also missing. This is all at the expense of small size and better performance. This small board is definitely suitable for Car PCs for your GPS system or perhaps pair it up with a small LCD screen with a USB TV stick to watch some DVB-T broadcasts. Well the possibilities are endless.
 

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