HP Mini 311-1025NR HDMI Review Processor Usage

I just got a new HP Mini 311-1025NR netbook for $499. From what I understand it is the only netbook in its class that has HDMI output with NVIDIA ION graphics.

I was looking for something small and lightweight for under $500 that could also be connected to a HD TV and output 1080 video.

So the first thing I did was to remove all the HP software it comes with. I love HP (I own 3 HP computers) but they bloat it up with a bunch of unnecessary software that runs on start up. Since this machine only has 2gig of RAM I wanted to make sure that it had all it’s resources free before I tested it.

Below are photos I took connecting up the HP to my TV with an HDMI cable.

Hulu

The first test I did was Hulu as you can see above. As you can see RAM is not an issue, the ATOM processor is. You can see the CPU is maxed out in the picture above. I tried both hi quality and low quality settings on the Hulu player and they both had tons of shuttering about once a second.

Youtube

Youtube did a bit better but it was still maxed out but shuttered a bit less. I caught the end of the video when I took the photo above, you can see the CPU dropped after it finished, but just look at the history of where it was.

QuickTime

Since I was disappointed with Flash so I tried QuickTime next with a downloaded 720p file from Vimeo. It was also very disappointing in the amount of shuttering on playback. Pretty much just as bad as Flash, that was a surprise to me I thought QuickTime would be less CPU intensive.

Mirillis Splash Lite

The big surprise was playback of my local AVCHD files that I took with my camcorder being played back with the Mirillis Splash Lite player. Check out the CPU usage – much better! It worked great with no shuttering at all. It looked great in full screen mode. Check out my other post on the Splash player.

I also tried the Splash player on the .mov file that I downloaded from Vimeo (TimeScapes from Tom Lowe) and it played great with the same 50% CPU usage.

Vimeo HTML5

On a side note I tried Vimeo with both Flash and HTML5 and they both dragged the CPU into submission. I thought that HTML5 would have been less CPU intense.

Conclusion

So I am a bit disappointed that I can’t play Hulu full screen on my TV. But it’s not that big of a deal because I plan on buying the Boxee Box in a few months.