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Asus' EEE Slate EP121 1A011M Poked and Prodded - Performance Part III

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Sean Kalinich
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EP121With every new product that hits the market there are going to be winners and losers. This is true from CPUs to GPU s and everything in between. There is one place where this is more true than any other segment of the market; this is the mobile market. Now the mobile market does not just mean phones (smart or dumb). This market includes everything from portable power sources to fully fledged desktop replacement notebooks. Currently the most competitive market is in the Tablet world. To most people Apple is king. They have the most successful tablet device out and are well into the second generation of the iPad. But first does not always mean best nor does popularity alone indicate complete success (although it certainly helps). Today we have the chance to take a look at one of the competitors to Apple. Not necessarily the iPad, although it will challenge that device in a major way, this is more of a direct threat to the Apple fan base and their tablet/ultra-portable devices. This is the EEE Slate EP121 (also called the EEE Pad) from Asus; a product launched at CES and one that packs quite a bit of hardware including an Intel Core i5 Dual Core CPU and up to 4GB of RAM. So sit back for a good read and decide for yourself if this one falls into the winner’s group or the losers.

Article Index

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Section III - Real World Usage
Photoshop CS5 -
Photoshop is an industry standard image manipulation application. It is great for not only editing photographs but also for creating original content. For out testing here we used the Driverheavn Photoshop script. This is a custom built action that puts a stock image through a series of filters and allows you to record the time each takes to run.
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Photoshop on the EP121 was quick for the most part. Opening up the application took no time at all. Even opening up 20MB RAW files was snappy. Most of our normal work (converting RAW files, cleaning up images, resizing them) was more than fast enough. Still when we ran our actual test we can see that under certain filters the EP121 is pretty slow.  Don’t let that worry you though, for most Photoshop use the EP121 is more than quick enough.

General Performance -
After carrying the EP 121 around for a couple of weeks I got a good feel for how it performs on the go.  In a word this slate from Asus is quick and nimble. Everyone that saw it in action was impressed. Even some of my Apple-centric friends admitted they were impressed despite themselves. Their last bastion of defense was to claim that the OS was open to viruses etc.. I honestly did not have the heart to let them know that their OS was as well. But that is for another story. I have found myself using this for more than just this review. I now use to read e-books, watch Netflix, photo editing and some basic manipulation and even to play some of my favorite older games. It runs the HalfLife series very well at 1280x800 as long as I have the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard available. There are a few quirks but then again nothing is perfect.

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