New laptop from asus

Any of you guys know what this laptop has inside? I think it's quite cool but hope it has some computing power too.

http://domprofesor.freehostia.com/ [...] r-bentley/

I replied in the other section (will now delete that duplicate post), I agree with L&W it is likely ULV CPU, integrated graphics and likely an SSD instead of HDD, so maybe not 'slow' but not a threat to a 7200RPM model.

Well the figures I've seen have showed that during full-use the SSD is just over half the power usage of a 5K drive.

The main thing is they don't have an idle RPM and a spin-up/spin-down cost in power so depending on the activity they can be wicked efficient in comparison, especially when comparing hours of incremental back-ups of word/excel/etc work, where they would like use less than 5% / or a 95% savings or 20,000% increase of the power of even a 4K RPM drive. But at that point though the drive starts being less of a power drain than the rest of the system, where the saving though large as a percentage wouldn't reach the power consumed by the LCD or CPU for more than 30mins. So you reach a point of diminishing returns where the numbers go through the roof, but they don't mean much.

The other great place for saving would be in media playback, where an HDD has to either spin constantly or erratically to feed the bitrate of the media to the computer to output. So for the SSD you don't have that problem, and usually for basic media the CPU and Memory aren't being overly taxed so you might actually get an extra hour out of 2 ripped DVDs on a flight versus the same rips on an HDD which is still more effieicnt still by like 30min-1hr over actually watching the spinning optical DVDs themselves. For stuff like that it's perfect, but could also be replaced my putting the media on a flash memory card/stick if the content is small enough (I used to rip a DVD to my 2 GB SD cards and watch them from the built in SD reader). However, heavy decompression media viewing like HD-DVD or DVD-Audio would kill the benefits though since there's more memory and CPU usage involved, which brings us to the problem/drawback of the SSD with regards to efficiency.

Now, when doing lots drive I/O constantly the power savings reduce a bit and then you'd see maybe a 20% savings, but also at reduced performance, so something like video editing may not buy you as much as you hoped because a render/rip etc might now take 10+ mins more to do due to the slow drive, and thus the power savings are wasted by the extra up time of the rest of the components.

But for the target of what most of the ultra-light eco-friendly PCs are targeted for (Office apps and Web Surfing IMO) they are perfect for an SSD because you can squeeze that extra 30 mins out of the same size battery (which you want slim to begin with) for these easy tasks. and also that exra 30 mins may help you finish writing that chapter, inputing that spreadsheet, or reading those web news/reviews, or watching those DVD rips on a flight.