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Hi, I’m thinking about buying The NC10 and I have a few questions I hope someone can help me out with. I will be using my netbook mostly for web browsing, but I would also like to run some emulators mainly Nintendo64 and snes, has anyone tired these or know if the nc10 can handle them? The other thing I’d reall like to use it for is the Lego Digital Designer, it’s a free lego CAD program, has anyone tried it or could someone with the 2GB upgrade possibly download and try it out? My current desktop is a P4 3.0 Ghz with 2Gb of ram and a radeon 9800 pro, would the NC10 be comparable speed wise? I would really appreciate any answers anyone has so I could make an informed decision.
Not seen that before, thanks for mentioning it:
http://ldd.lego.com/If no one knows I can give it a go maybe at the weekend – too busy right now. I’m sure someone else will get back to you sooner though! You should find emulators run just fine, there are a few threads mentioning them around here but obviously I do insist on limiting chat about less than legal ROMS etc! But I’m sure you know where to go for info on them anyway!
How does it compare to your desktop? It’s hard to say. The NC10 is not good for games that need chunky 3D graphics, so it won’t compare even to an old 9800pro. Playing UT2k4 on my NC10 reminds me of playing UT2k4 on my Radeon 9200. Which was not a good card! The Atom runs at 1.6Ghz but it’s not fair to compare on clock speed alone, there are a few advancements on the P4 in there.
The Atom is actually pretty capable, but the only way to be sure is to get someone to test it, hopefully someone might know 🙂
From the min spec I’d say it would be OK
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*Minimum System Requirements for PC
*Operating system: Windows XP.
*CPU: 800 MHz processor or higher
*Graphics card: 32 MB graphics card (OpenGL 1.1 or higher compatible)
*RAM: 256 MB
*Hard Disk Space: 100 MBFirstly, your desktop machine will outperform the NC10 both in processing power and especially graphics performance.
Emulating a SNES works fine, I don’t know about emulating a Nintendo 64.
I’ll see if I can try LEGO Digital Designer on my NC10 later.
EDIT2: Ok just tried the LDD and it appears to work fine, I imported a couple of starter models (helicopter and house) and added a few bricks and moved the camera around. Some slight lag when moving the camera around after I imported a car, not sure how smooth it runs on other machines though.EDIT: Congrats on 1000 posts jez 🙂
yikes 1000! I need to get out more!
Thanks for testing it Alfihar. Hopefully that gives gazakull a hint at what to expect. Now I think about it, I do recall reading the N64 emulator needed a decent graphics card back when I looked into 10 years ago or whatever. I remember not being able to run it! Time has moved on a fair bit since then though ;)!
Hi
To answer your question on CAD, I can run Full Autodesk Civils 08 on mine with 1GB memory, so CAD use is fine. It’s probably not suitable for heavy 3D modelling and rendering, although it will work with 3D shapes. I am yet to push it.
You may want to check out my thread in GD which mentions the performance of the NC10. From tests I have quickly run at the moment, I see performance is roughly comparable to an AMD XP1800/2000+. (I have a back issue of PC pro where these machines cost Ă‚ÂŁ1500-Ă‚ÂŁ2000ish a few years ago and were considered to be uber, how times change)
I am currently undertaking some proper benchmark testing at the moment and will hopefully have a post up later tonight. Initial testing today shows that generally opening and saving files is slower than my work desktop (a Pentium D 3.6Ghz) but only by a few seconds.
For example, opening 2MB-4MB Bound CAD drawings from the desktop when Autodesk is not launched takes 10-15s. On the NC10 it takes 15-20s. Now technically the NC10 is 33% slower but in practice, you don’t actually notice the difference. (This is on the battery in normal mode & max power saving). If the CAD software is already open, then loading a file into it has minimal difference.
For Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe Pdfs its only a few seconds difference if any to open and in the real world you don’t notice it.
The NC10 is not as quick as the latest desktop machines or notebooks. But it is powerful enough to get stuff done. If it’s not your main machine and you’re just using it as a portable environment on trips out and about, then it’s ideal.
The main constraint of the NC10 (and Atom 1.6) is we seem to be spoiled by huge specs and powerful number crunchers in today’s PCs. It’s easy to forget that machines from 5 years ago, although they ran slower, still did their job well enough and will happily run modern software. In todays market the NC10 does lag behind, but that doesn’t detract from what it can offer and do.
The Atom is not great for encoding but neither were machines from a few years ago. You can do it on them but if you have a main PC then there is no need. For people looking at the NC10 as their sole PC its fine for everyday Web and Office use but so are Pentium III 1GHzs.
For light Adobe CS, CAD and Modelling use it will do the job but it’s not really suitable as a main PC replacement for these. For media/video/mp3 file encoding the NC10 is not going to be a great choice, but again it will cope with it just slowly.
The NC10 is not a gaming machine, however, I will be testing what can run but it has already been established that older games, especially strategy games can run.
Catia V16 runs extremely well on my nc10 with 1GB ram. i could be editing 20 distinct parts with assembly calculations running in the background. to be honest, i was pretty surprised.
Thanks to everyone who respoded and took the time out to help, It’s a lot easier to make the decision to buy knowing it can handle whant to use it for.
One more question, I was planning on ordering the 2GB memory upgrade and a 500GB HDD and installing the winodws 7 beta, I have some ripped dvd’s, if I copy a couple over to the hard drive will I be able to play them back without any problems, I assume the NC10 could handle the playback but I’d like to konw ahead of time, Thanks to everyone again for the help.
If you are talking about watching movies on the NC10, then yes, it will cope fine – especially if you use VLC media player.
The speakers ain’t great but then again, what do we expect for the outlay – good headphones make a big difference.
Maybe a little late to the party here, but I have run an N64 emulator (project 64) on the machine, but not all games run smoothly. Diddy kong racing and mario 64 were fine but goldeneye and perfect dark were too choppy to play. Kind of cool hooking it up to my HDTV and playing on the couch just like the old days.
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