ASUS Eee PC Take 3: The XPerience

Gaming/3D Performance

As this model is running Windows, let's investigate what this system is capable of, and try to find something a little more entertaining than Tux Racer.

3Dmark 2001SE

We had to dig through the mothballs to get this out, but given the speed of the CPU, we had to go back this far to get something that would run smoothly.

The results look less than stellar, but the framerates themselves weren't bad. 640x480 is not a supported video mode, and crashed partway through.

Ah, that's why it's unsupported.


Low detail


High detail

3Dmark 2003

What does this tell us? Not much, other than this benchmark is already getting outside of the Eee's reach. Glancing at the laptop while running this would usually look something like the following image.

Ouch…

So we've seen a couple of synthetic benchmarks, but what about real games? There are many games the Eee will "run", a.k.a. it will start and progress at a snail's pace, but we wanted to focus on games that run well and will be fun to play on the Eee.

Unreal Tournament

No, we're not talking about UT2003, 2004, or UT:3, but the original from November 1999. This title is still fun to play, and ran flawlessly at the native resolution of 800 x 480.

This was roughly a 90-second battle with bots enabled, and should represent average gameplay. Framerates were smooth with no issues.

Diablo II

Released in June 2000, Diablo II was a fantastic sequel that nearly everyone played. Initial installation of this game didn't look good, as it produced the following screen after the video test.

Attempting to run the game anyway generated a crash. A little digging online revealed that adding the -w switch to the executable (windowed mode) solves the problem.

800x600 works fine for this game; you'll just need to center the window. 800x480 results in not being able to press the necessary buttons to proceed in the game. Framerates hovered around 25-30 FPS in town, but may drop in large battles or with lots of magic onscreen.

American McGee's Alice

Alice is a fun game released in October 2000 and based on the Quake III Arena engine. (Interesting side note: a film adaptation is due for release this summer.)

Not quite fullscreen.

Tests were run at 640x480, which ran well but not fullscreen (it stays anchored to the left side). The average framerate is a little low here. The game is generally playable, but unless we can increase the framerate, it's probably not enjoyable long term.

The general conclusion when it comes to gaming: look for titles from about 2001 and earlier, and you should be able to find a plethora of games that will run well and are still exciting and fun to play. Who knows, you might get re-hooked on an old classic, or discover a new one. You could also look into some of the emulation options to open up a large library of titles that won't quickly fill up the limited storage capacity.