@Li Feng It will thermal throttle in the end, it is insulated by metal chasis, no ventilation, no heatsink. The whole device will warm up in warm climate. There's no heat exhaust.
If you're looking for a decent device to test the Atom x7 X8750, the 1st gen GPD Win (refresh model) had that and it's actually really decent imo. And as far as Atom testing goes, while it's not a PC, it would be interesting to explore the Atom chips Intel made for smartphones many years ago during their mobile push attempt. I think the ASUS ZenFone 2 with the Atom Z3590 was the last phone to use an Intel Atom SoC.
I would actually like to see how the "best" Atom would hold up, maybe you could go all out and give it an SSD and the maximum amount of RAM it can take.
@@indiawest2025 that was the case early on in the ivy Bridge/haswell days, where Pentium dual-cores are basically stripped down core processors (just like in the core 2 duo Conroe era). Pentiums then became atom-based with the N0000 models; then came Pentium Gold which is basically the old Pentium dual cores (and Pentium B-series) and the Atom-based Pentium N-series became Pentium Silver.
Are chromebooks even a thing? Like smartphone is basically a chromebook without a keyboard. If I have keyboard/touchpad I see no reason to use android anymore.
The Skyrim and Fable results really surprised me considering how the old Atoms performed. I am curious how Minecraft and Half Life 2 would run on the higher end Atom with dual channel memory so I hope you end up making that video!
Having owned a Surface 3, (not pro) I can confirm that storage and memory were the real bottlenecks. Still, being able to decode x265 video (at 1080p, no less) on a device with such a good screen and long battery life, all in a package that weighed around 1 pound, was impressive for what it was.
You can also find a bunch of these Atom chips in NAS boxes (Qnap and Synology), and they had a very big issue with the clock generator on the chip degrading which causes them to brick. EEVblog did a very good video on it and he also showed how to easily fix those chips once that happens -- it's basically just adding a pull-up resistor from the clock trace to +Vcc.
Wholly agree! The newer Atoms actually have a fair amount to give, especially so given the crazy low price-range they sat in. It's just a shame so many of the devices equipped with 'em often had infuriating flaws, and are basically disposable machines. Of these kind of things I've used/owned, the Thinkpad 10 was probably my favorite.
I remember getting an Intel Atom N2600 HP 110 a long time ago and it was quite a beast, I've got an Z8350 with 4gb ram and it works quite well too especially using the Steam Streaming option from a main PC. :D
I had a little hybrid machine with an atom z3790 and it was pretty fast. 2gb ram, sure, but it ran at 2.4ghz and could play fallout 3 and similar titles pretty well
I had the same HP 110 as Aaron. I managed to make that netbook do some crazy stuff, like play StarCraft II (only very ugly). The main reason that older atoms like the N2600 were terrible for watching videos, was a lack of hardware H264 decoding. I had a highly optimized software for H264 decoding, that managed to make my HP 110 play 720p videos while maxing out the CPU. I was able to upgrade the HP 110 to 2GBs of RAM, which was a MASSIVE boon to its performance. My new Chuwei tablet with the Z8350 has hardware H264 decoding, so youtube and others run fine. I just wish it had 4GBs of ram, but the 2GBs of ram is fine for something I only really use as a manga reader and sometimes video watching tablet.
I've watched your n450 atom video 5 times, thanks for doing another atom based video. Ill miss these, they were really cool, its so sad they're never paired with decent specs... Newer atoms all have a sh*tty 32gigs emmc. If they were upgradeable like my atom D525 was, they'd be way better
@@bananya6020 I use a n455 daily for learning c++ Mine *only* has an SD card. No emmc, no sata or IDE slots. Kinda sucks, but win7 kinda runs fine in it, faster than using an thumb drive.
Greetings from a fellow D525 Atom user (EEEPC 1215n). I've upgraded to an SSD and to Win10 32-bit, but now the Nvidia drivers somewhat screwed up and I've lost HDMI out. There used to be a huge EEEPC community with lots of info, but those forums are now gone as well. Do you have similiar issues?
@@user-kd4pg8hu7t sadly, I dont have a D525 anymore. Now I use a N455. Nvidia drivers? But if I remember correctly, mine had a Intel GMA3150. Are you sure you arent using wrong drivers?
@@SummonerArthur No I am not wrong, as mine is a cool big 12.1" netbook with a discrete video (Nvidia ION 2 platform), which enabled some light gaming. I even tested StarCraft 2 on it. You could see videos on YT with this model playing Mass Effect 2, Crysis (low details, of course). But Nvidia has obviously dropped support. The GMA3150 wasn't even capable of accelerating video, so you've missed a lot.
I'm still running the first desktop atom from Zotac and 4 gigs of ddr2 ram. It's the single core version with hyper threading. What made it last so long was the Nvidia graphics portion. It's really surprising how well the Intel Atoms can run. Thanks for the video.
Watching on a TV stick running the X5-Z8350. It's definitely hindered by the eMMC. Not much for games. But steam in home streaming is fine! It's been a great little computer for streaming video and it is significantly power saving compared to my desktop. I love that it runs off of a 5V3A usb power supply. I notice the driver issue too, mine has the issue that it won't detect HDMI audio out. A Windows Update made HDMI disappear as an audio source and it hasn't came back even with driver reinstall 😂
the last few series of atoms were pretty good. I have a thinkpad tablet with atom x7 series and can't complain, works great, I even ran some virtual machines on it and surprisingly they were fully usable. I have a HP baytrail celeron tablet with a legit m.2 slot and slotted ram
@@DarkLinkAD Pretty poorly, most likely due to the neutered cache. I tested one of these against a 7th gen i5 at 1.2 GHz and the i5 outperformed it in raw CPU Power by around 60%
Z520 the slowest ever made... back in the 2009 i get a netbook with atom z520 because i was a noob, half performance than p4 630 from 2004, that cpu was annoying slow so even the 5400 rpm hdd was not a bottleneck...
Great video, it will definitely get some rewatches from me (just like the last of old Atoms one)! I guess it's now time to check out some cheap Celeron based laptop... Or see how far can we push Sandy Bridge prebuilt
You should really try the higher end surface 3! I would imagine the higher x7, 4 gigs and most importantly, the 128 gb ssd would make it much better for general things.
Just over a year ago I bought an Acer Switch S1003-12JT 10.1” 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop with Intel® x5-Z8350, 32GB eMMC, 4GB RAM & Windows 10 while it was on sale for about 250 dollars (CDN) and I've been super happy with using it as a Streaming target for Steam from my main PC and with a bluetooth Xbox One controller. For storage I use a 128gb Sandisk microsd card and it has acceptable performance for the pre-2008 era games I have on it and then run a mix of 4 player indie titles such as: Tricky Towers, Lover's in a Dangerous Space Time and Bro Force. If you can get one cheap enough this model can work much like a Switch around your house streaming from the main PC as mentioned since it has Micro HDMI out on it. One thing I did fine that I had to do with it in Windows 10 was to lookup how to add the "Minimum CPU Speed" option to it (This also disappears after running a windows update again it seems) and set it to 100 percent otherwise the Atom wanted to not run at about half speed for some titles. I'm not sure if its a bug or not but I figured some folks are perhaps seeing a similar issue since not adding that to the registry allows the atom to run below 1ghz for a bunch of software right after you launch it on steam which in the above mentioned Bro Force made it nearly unplayable without the tweak. Anyway, great video. :D
I used to run CATIA V5(R20) on an Atom (N170?) based netbook (with built in hard disk) and it worked quite well. Individual parts were fine and zooming/rotation had no problems. The problems came when there were large assemblies being moved around. I designed a playground with many, many parts and had to render a fly-through to mpg format instead of manipulating it live because it could barely do only 3-5 frames a second! Mind you, when I designed and animated a small 4-stroke engine on kinematics, it was flawless. It got me through uni though and it never shut down on me.
I had several Atoms, including the N270, N450, D425 (with 4GB of dual-chan RAM). The D425 was actually pretty good in a small form-factor desktop used as a NAS.
The mere mention of a £200 AM4 Ryzen system has set off my ADHD* making me want to go and budget one out to tinker with and set up for my kids... I'll stay and watch! I promise! *I do literally legitimately have ADHD
I made it! Great video, it's well shot, narrated, and edited! I'm really impressed by the performance considering the teeny tiny wattage of this Atom, I feel that my experiences as a layman using Atoms may well have been informed by my ignorance about what may have actually been a bottleneck in those systems.
I've loads of those latter-era Atoms in a variety of form factors. I'm quite enamoured of them! Yes, they all have the 2GB/32GB RAM/eMMC limit, but I like 'em. Game-wise, they run Civ IV, Serious Sam, Doom 3, basically pre-2006 games just fine but I like them as portable field-repair devices. They're tiny! I even have a small cylinder PC about 15CM tall, same specs, HDMI output - great fun.
I used to run these little chips as my primary laptops (and I only use laptops for 10+ years). At 4G rams and 64G eMMC, it could run win 10 1607, Office 2013 and firefox (but not chrome) at decent speed without turboboost (for max battery life). One of the best unit I had my hands on is Lenovo Yoga Book. It has a x5 chip and better eMMC storage. FYI: these chips runs into 5W TDP when running at turbo boost, you could use throttle stop and firmware setting to partially override the thermal wall throttle setting (kind of battle override).
I'd kill to have an SSD in my Z8350 tablet. I'm glad I only use it for reading manga and sometimes watching videos, otherwise I'd be angry that I spent money on it at all.
Last netbook based atom, though I have a modern Atom powering a VM server; an Atom C3758 on a Supermicro A2SDi-8C+HLN4F mini-itx board. 8 cores paired with 64gigs of DDR4 RDIMMs and a wonderful low power draw of around 50-60W under full load for the entire system (fans, hard drives, etc). Works great!
These also make for great servers. They are still a great alternative for things like raspberry pis. Can be had for half the price, but they are at least twice as powerful.
I got myself a Celeron SoC and I'm baffled, it goes so much better with ssd and a gt1030! I could even play Nier Automata with the patch that corrects global illumination.
ARM was really the nail in the coffin for these Atoms. They may not have x86 support, but any programs/games that could take advantage of that won't really run on it anyways.
When I was a kid, I used to modify the n270 Atom with modded drivers, I got it actually boot crisis by emulating the shader model 3.0 command calls. It was a buggy mess, a rainbow sky but it worked. There may be some videos still online of the GMA 945 emulating shader pixel 3.0. All in all, I won't miss using that bloody thing, but I will miss those days!
A nice cheap option for anyone interested in playing with an Atom X5-Z8350 is the AtomicPi. I use mine as a silent passively cooled desktop, though I have moved to a pi4 for that role more recently. It's still nice to have a windows machine on the desk too, and this video makes want to play with it more.
Oddly, I had a 14" HP X360 with one of the higher end Atoms with 4GB of RAM and M.2 SSD onboard and it was a very different experience. It worked well enough for development use.
Very nice overview! I've always liked the Atom chips; considering the power draw the theoretical performance output is very impressive. However, as you said; in the vast majority of cases they're put in some very dreary systems.
I am still using a Samsung NC210 (Atom N550) to this day and I am very happy with it. It isn't the fastest, but it does everything I need it to do. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and put in an SSD. I run a dual boot of Lubuntu 18.04 and Windows XP Professional.
Great video, I've said for a while that atoms made more sense than an i3 for a budget laptop for a kid. Just a question, did you test whilst plugged into power to account for any power state changes?
I have an ASUS Transformer 100HA with a Cherrytrail CPU mated with 4GB of RAM and 128 GB internal with expansion via SD Card slot. It is a great little 2 in 1 for network diagnostics as it can fit in some tight spaces and is pretty speedy.
I had an Asus Vivotab as a daily driver notepad kind of thing for several years now. A small 8-inch tab on Atom, with full Windows and a pen is a surprisingly producive machine. Also handled NFS Most Wanted well enough to entertain me on a long flight.
I had a cherry trail chip when they were still kind of new. I had it in a Windows 10 tablet running the original 2015 version. It held up extremely well for a device with 1 GB of low power DDR3 memory and 32 GB of EMMC storage. At the time I mostly played games along the lines of Garry's mod and it ran very well. When I switched to that machine I was moving from a Windows XP computer with four usable gigabytes of DDR2 memory, a G-Force 7300 LE, RAID IDE caviar blacks from WD, and a cedarmill Pentium 4 (Pentium D series) 930 clocked at 3 GHz THE DAMN THING COSTED AN ARM AND A LEG WHEN IT WAS NEW (though I did add a dual boot HDD over SATA with Ubuntu 12.04 later which allowed me to use my full 8 GB, didn't want to upgrade to XP 64-bit edition because I would lose media center edition features I paid for)
One note about Minecraft: If you're installing it on windows 10, I recommend downloading the bedrock or 'Windows 10' edition from the Microsoft store instead of running java. Because it's meant to run on multiple different device categories ranging from phones to consoles, the code is written in C/C++ and is super optimised. So even if you're cpu limited, it should run an absolute treat on these older devices! Just thought that'd be a good heads up! Great videos as always!
I remember a lot of these little things being popular for using to run BackTrack (Kali) linux builds. It was so as hell for most applications and only had a few usecases but you couldn't beat the price. It pretty much became a disposable system.
got a couple of hybrids running on atoms. They're perfect for streaming from xbox or pc. work flawlessly so if you are short of a tv these are great and you can watch youtube or do your interwebs on!
My first notebook was actually a netbook - the good old Asus EEE 901. This thing ran quite OK with a customized Windows XP Home ISO (nLite) but the 12 GB SSD (Phison) was just utter crap which suffered from data loss and overall had a very very bad performance. You could even play some WoW and Warcraft III (and obviously older games) on it. The form factor and keyboard was great, also I kind of liked the screen back then. While the Atom based CPUs might be weak from today's point of view, they were a decent product for their use-case back then. And for streaming some videos back in 2009/2010, they were actually quite a decent product. Netbooks were made for browsing the web and playing some video and doing light productivity stuff - and for that, they were sufficient.
I recently bought a obviously used and old lenovo m83 sff pc, with a 4th gen i3, single stick 4gb ram and 500gb 3.5 7.2k hdd, changed out the hdd to two ssd 240 & 500gb, and added 3 more 4gb sticks and it became really smooth sailing when doing simple tasks and running really old games, planning to get a low profile gpu ranging from either a gtx 750ti to a gtxc 1650 to pair up with it, when I eventually change my main pc platform from my i7 4790k paired with gtx 1080, and just put the i7 in there, and yes I'm aware that the pc wont be able to oc, and it doesn't matter at that point when I'm just going to use that pc for steaming to or for low power afk grind in mmorpgs that I remote into.
Have an Acer AspireOne ZG5 running as a file server, and a Toshiba NB300 netbook as a personal daily. Both have ssds installed, aspireone has a 1tb samsung 870 QVO while the nb300 has a 240GB WD Green. Both are running linux mint, so i can provide a well qualified view with regards to the performance of the older intel atom cpus. basically while adding an ssd will drastically improve performance, these cpus are still vastly limited by the sata controllers that they are equipped with. they have so much potential given a sata 2.5 controller but are often limited by sata 1. also worth noting that dual channel ram makes very little difference, but as we all know, it helps. Get one if you need something smaller than todays offerings on the go and at a cheap price, but bear in mind, you do get what you pay for so expect only basic usage. Highly recommend setting yt resolution to 240-360p at most. playback from local storage is best at 480p, though i haven't been game enough to consider 720p playback. If there's any operating system i can recommend using on computers equipped with these cpus, It's Pixel OS, from the raspberry pi foundation. You'll get the best performance on that OS, but at the sacrifice of being able to use sleep/standby.
The first GPD Win portable PC game console thingy used these cherry trail chips, there's a large community that like to mod and alter games to get them running on those so I'd imagine that if you were to apply the same fixes to whichever games then you could get them running on this
I bought one of these with a cracked touchscreen for about 34$. Replaced the touchscreen for 19$ and I got myself a fully working tablet laptop. The Emmc was also my concern though. It is very slow and very little storage (32GB). The built in micro sd card reader is also trash. It disconnects from time to time. I had to frankenstein a micro sd card reader to its micro usb otg port and glued the reader to the back. The forums said that this problem is caused by the drivers of the chip itself (Card reader drivers are from 2006). Anyways, aside from that, I am really impressed with the battery on these things. It lasts about 5 hours at medium usage. The screen is also IPS which is great for movies. The Atom decently decodes 1080P 60fps h264 videos with very minimal stuttering probably due to it being passively cooled. Overall, its not really bad for the price.
I have a Dell Venue 10 5056 with an Atom 8500 in it and 4GB of RAM. For a lot of what I do, it's my daily workhorse as it's small enough to fit in tight server closets and I can just plug a console cable in and get to work.
I have a Netbook with an Atom N2600. Playing video in a browser is terrible, but it handles native media playback surprisingly well. Only real drawback is that the board it's on has only 1gb of DDR3 soldered to the board, no additional dimm slots. I still use it for a dedicated Kodi machine nearly 10 years after it's release.
I have a Lenovo Flex with a Celeron n4000 in it, got 2 of them for 56 bucks each because of a pricing error over the holidays. I've been using it for light stuff for the past month and I gotta say that for how low powered it is, it's really not that bad. The Flex I have has 4gb of ram so there's more give in that department, and it has a free m.2 slot (undocumented, but it's hidden underneath a ribbon cable) that I threw a 20 dollar el cheapo 256gb ssd into, which took the slower emmc out of the equation (actually the emmc in this isn't bad at all, it's faster than a regular ssd running over sata 2). It can run a lot of modern stuff at lower settings, almost anything indie and everything 2d. It streams from an XBox wonderfully too. I don't think I'd have paid full price for it, since there are Ryzen 3200u based laptops in the same price range, but for a passively cooled convertible this is not too bad at all. And the tablet mode has come in handy at times.
Using an Atom based laptop, Dell Venue 10 pro 1055. I still like it because its very portable and it runs a full fledged Windows 10 operating system. It seems like mine was released in early 2015. I ran userbenchmark on it and it said for the CPU, "With an extremely low single core score, this CPU can barely handle email and light web browsing". I don't know if I'd go that far, but in Windows 10 pro 32 bit, it seems to handle web browsing and 720p RUclips playback in the latest version of Chrome just fine. Also, most 3d games from 2006 or earlier will also run well on it. I remember something like the game of STALKER shadow of Chernobyl from 2007 seems to run fine on it.
Hi, another great quality video. i have a tv / pc, it is one of those cheap nuc copies, called Cenovo ( yes with a C ) Cherry Z8350 Quad core with 4g ram and 64G flash memory. It was new and very cheap i think in 2017 i paid @ 140 AU Why did i buy it, well it is new had win 10 genuine ( well apparently microsoft gives it away to all OEM manufacturers with a small 2G or less machine to stop the spread of Android ) It works fine and i wanted a quiet media player that i can keep next to the tv or in my bedroom and basically never turn if off, it does youtube sort of ok up to 720k, but it is best at 480k I realized the flash storage was a issue, and your comment on degradation now explaines a old HP 100 mini that i still have that did use win7 but became very slow, i formated it and it took about 3 hours to install win 7, it takes almost 4 mins to boot to login. I installed linux mint and it was better, my wife used it for a while and 2 days later gave it back, so i reformated it and installed puppy 5.6, as it loaded to ram on bootup it flies so the flash storage only does one read and one write cyles on every start up, the image is about 300 meg so it should last a while, once it dies i may use it of the usb 2 interface as i do the same with a thin client ( i actually use it as a thin client, the Wyse image is on the storage card and i boot of USB for puppy ) Some machines cost way to much to try and fix, for the money you spend you can almost buy a new chromebook or bottom end laptop like a HP Stream I guess they are basically a use and throw away item, give it a 5 year life as most times the cpu / ram / storage is soldered in like say a mac mini Regards George
I have a couple of those Chinese mini PCs with a Z8350 in them, and I currently use one as a server of sorts, for simple mundane tasks on my network, and pretty much that's all they're good for, the RAM is super slow, and often runs out, which them causes it to page, and the storage is so slow too, as you noted, that the whole machine just bogs down... You can play back video seemingly fine, but they're not that versatile other than for "low intensity computing". But at least for what I use it for, they work great, all it does is sync my Google Photos, uploads to Google Play Music when I need it to, serves as a server for a USB over IP type app, (networked optical drives anyone?).
What do you call an Atom thermal throttling?
Nuclear fission.
@Li Feng Gotta be careful when blowing up that TNT in Minecraft.
A funny joke but my Atom "server" doesn't thermal throttling, thermal shutdown only
@@theoldone22 that's the joke
👏👏
@Li Feng It will thermal throttle in the end, it is insulated by metal chasis, no ventilation, no heatsink. The whole device will warm up in warm climate. There's no heat exhaust.
"It's not fast, it works but it's slow" - Budget-Builds Official, 2019
Yeah the Nextbook Ares 8 prossesor is a Intel atom
@@RuviaPawz ...?
The fact that you installed windows sideways amazes me.
The last quark of an atom inside an Intel atom.
@CZ PC I'm not joking, Intel actually made a processor called the Intel Quark. It is meant to be a very low power CPU.
@@LBSiUK Your on a non lift video?
@@NCHLT yes
@@LBSiUK I used to use some 2007 flagship PC , Now I use 2016 flagship PC
Wait a minute you didn't test crysis
That's illegal
dobarlikfilip it probably wouldn’t run well (if at all) due to the ram
@@exaltedb yeah 😅
There are Atoms paired with a geforce dedicated gpu
@@ayuchanayuko bottlenecks:
*_are you challenging me ?!_*
100th like!
If you're looking for a decent device to test the Atom x7 X8750, the 1st gen GPD Win (refresh model) had that and it's actually really decent imo. And as far as Atom testing goes, while it's not a PC, it would be interesting to explore the Atom chips Intel made for smartphones many years ago during their mobile push attempt. I think the ASUS ZenFone 2 with the Atom Z3590 was the last phone to use an Intel Atom SoC.
I have the ZenFone 2. It is z3580
@@aetvrna It is an underrated phone honestly, with some weird issues tho
@@iamkailong i own it. it is shit. 4h screen on time, runs hot, many apps in play store is incompatible
@@pinkipromise I remember 4h screen on being ok back then, at least for my use case. And yes, as I said, it had weird issues.
@@pinkipromise This is a 5 year old android phone. It beat out OnePlus back in the day... Please give credit where credit is due.
Praise the lords, after hours of waiting; It's here.
Me too
It's volv-! Oh wait, nevermind
I would actually like to see how the "best" Atom would hold up, maybe you could go all out and give it an SSD and the maximum amount of RAM it can take.
Ram is soldered on these Atom based machines, and ssd... There are not much options where you can upgrade it
4gb
From ark.intel.com
Best gaming PC
-the last Atom made
-SSD
- 64 GB ram
- RTX 2060
who would waste their time on an atom xdd
So you want to see the z8750 with 8gb ram?
Atom will live on as rebranded, low-end Core M.
No core m is not Atom. Celeron and Pentium silvers are.
@@ayuchanayuko Only celerons are
Well technically the last was Knights landing the Xeon Phi GPGP that used a couple cluster of cores based on atom.
@@indiawest2025 that was the case early on in the ivy Bridge/haswell days, where Pentium dual-cores are basically stripped down core processors (just like in the core 2 duo Conroe era). Pentiums then became atom-based with the N0000 models; then came Pentium Gold which is basically the old Pentium dual cores (and Pentium B-series) and the Atom-based Pentium N-series became Pentium Silver.
And core Y, and the newer celerons
And at last, we have last Atom to ever be in the market. It's been a great journey, Intel Atom... A great journey indeed.
I think Chromebooks could've saved the Atom line.
Chromebooks where well out before they killed Atoms. Chromebooks just went for Celerons and ARM instead.
ARM is cheaper for Chromebooks
@@silvy7394 Don't forget bulldozer, that too still lives in chromebooks.
Most ARMs are more powerful than these Atoms and Celerons. The premium-tier Snapdragon 855+ could be way more powerful than an i3.
Are chromebooks even a thing? Like smartphone is basically a chromebook without a keyboard. If I have keyboard/touchpad I see no reason to use android anymore.
The Skyrim and Fable results really surprised me considering how the old Atoms performed. I am curious how Minecraft and Half Life 2 would run on the higher end Atom with dual channel memory so I hope you end up making that video!
I can tell you personally on my netbook it can run 1.8.9 with optifine at 60fps with 4 chunk render and everything else minimum settings.
1.9 is a little iffy, and 1.10-1.12 are barely playable while 1.13+ are just horrible
Having owned a Surface 3, (not pro) I can confirm that storage and memory were the real bottlenecks. Still, being able to decode x265 video (at 1080p, no less) on a device with such a good screen and long battery life, all in a package that weighed around 1 pound, was impressive for what it was.
2watts, I think it need some mega water cooled solution - or just loads of tea.
You can also find a bunch of these Atom chips in NAS boxes (Qnap and Synology), and they had a very big issue with the clock generator on the chip degrading which causes them to brick. EEVblog did a very good video on it and he also showed how to easily fix those chips once that happens -- it's basically just adding a pull-up resistor from the clock trace to +Vcc.
Wholly agree! The newer Atoms actually have a fair amount to give, especially so given the crazy low price-range they sat in. It's just a shame so many of the devices equipped with 'em often had infuriating flaws, and are basically disposable machines.
Of these kind of things I've used/owned, the Thinkpad 10 was probably my favorite.
Gotta love the "The Sims" music!
What brought my attention to the Cherry Trail chips was the GPD Win, and it's because of that that I knew it was a decent chip. Thanks for the video!
I remember that there were some atoms that seriously kicked ass, I mean for a low powered laptop or tablet they were actually not that bad
I remember getting an Intel Atom N2600 HP 110 a long time ago and it was quite a beast, I've got an Z8350 with 4gb ram and it works quite well too especially using the Steam Streaming option from a main PC. :D
My Chinese tablet can run Skyrim. How could I complain about that?
I had a little hybrid machine with an atom z3790 and it was pretty fast. 2gb ram, sure, but it ran at 2.4ghz and could play fallout 3 and similar titles pretty well
I had the same HP 110 as Aaron. I managed to make that netbook do some crazy stuff, like play StarCraft II (only very ugly). The main reason that older atoms like the N2600 were terrible for watching videos, was a lack of hardware H264 decoding. I had a highly optimized software for H264 decoding, that managed to make my HP 110 play 720p videos while maxing out the CPU. I was able to upgrade the HP 110 to 2GBs of RAM, which was a MASSIVE boon to its performance.
My new Chuwei tablet with the Z8350 has hardware H264 decoding, so youtube and others run fine. I just wish it had 4GBs of ram, but the 2GBs of ram is fine for something I only really use as a manga reader and sometimes video watching tablet.
@@TheXev If you have a PS4 or gaming PC, these things are extremely great for PS Remote play and moonlight gamestreaming
If they had used dual channel ram and NVME storage, then this could have been a much more appealing and usable product for a lot of people.
NVME alone would have cost more than the laptop itself.
At least ssd at sata3
Quite surprised at the Atoms power, great video
I've watched your n450 atom video 5 times, thanks for doing another atom based video.
Ill miss these, they were really cool, its so sad they're never paired with decent specs...
Newer atoms all have a sh*tty 32gigs emmc.
If they were upgradeable like my atom D525 was, they'd be way better
mine let me use an sd card. Not perfect but it seriously did help.
@@bananya6020 I use a n455 daily for learning c++
Mine *only* has an SD card. No emmc, no sata or IDE slots. Kinda sucks, but win7 kinda runs fine in it, faster than using an thumb drive.
Greetings from a fellow D525 Atom user (EEEPC 1215n). I've upgraded to an SSD and to Win10 32-bit, but now the Nvidia drivers somewhat screwed up and I've lost HDMI out. There used to be a huge EEEPC community with lots of info, but those forums are now gone as well. Do you have similiar issues?
@@user-kd4pg8hu7t sadly, I dont have a D525 anymore. Now I use a N455.
Nvidia drivers? But if I remember correctly, mine had a Intel GMA3150. Are you sure you arent using wrong drivers?
@@SummonerArthur No I am not wrong, as mine is a cool big 12.1" netbook with a discrete video (Nvidia ION 2 platform), which enabled some light gaming. I even tested StarCraft 2 on it. You could see videos on YT with this model playing Mass Effect 2, Crysis (low details, of course). But Nvidia has obviously dropped support.
The GMA3150 wasn't even capable of accelerating video, so you've missed a lot.
9:22 THAT'S IT, here is the proff that you can run Skyrim even on a toaster, yet alone on this one!
Oh, you're finally awake
Using Sims BGM? I love you!!1
I am an actual fan of the Atom CPU, I own a couple and it amazed me when they first came out because of just what they were capable of
Ah intel atom... Bane of my teenage years way back then 😂
Celerons still are the bane of my life.
@@fhddhdhk9319 1.1GHz I lived with
@@fhddhdhk9319 which one? Might be upgradable
@@NPCDCBA its a laptop cpu so no upgradability.
I consider myself lucky because I had a pentium
Awesome video, my ASUS EeePC has an Intel N270. Still works extremely fast for web browsing and watching videos with Linux! :D
I'm still running the first desktop atom from Zotac and 4 gigs of ddr2 ram. It's the single core version with hyper threading. What made it last so long was the Nvidia graphics portion. It's really surprising how well the Intel Atoms can run. Thanks for the video.
Watching on a TV stick running the X5-Z8350. It's definitely hindered by the eMMC. Not much for games. But steam in home streaming is fine! It's been a great little computer for streaming video and it is significantly power saving compared to my desktop. I love that it runs off of a 5V3A usb power supply.
I notice the driver issue too, mine has the issue that it won't detect HDMI audio out. A Windows Update made HDMI disappear as an audio source and it hasn't came back even with driver reinstall 😂
There are fixea for that :P
if this was a primiere i would be here for 4 min until it ended great vid btw
I love the sims background over this
Really good - always enjoy your videos!
the last few series of atoms were pretty good. I have a thinkpad tablet with atom x7 series and can't complain, works great, I even ran some virtual machines on it and surprisingly they were fully usable. I have a HP baytrail celeron tablet with a legit m.2 slot and slotted ram
Try the x7, the Best Atom ever made
How does it compare to an under-clocked/undervolted CPU of the same generation though?
@@DarkLinkAD I have no idea but I'm pretty sure I saw videos of it running GameCube games fairly decent. like on the level of a very old i3
@@DarkLinkAD Pretty poorly, most likely due to the neutered cache. I tested one of these against a 7th gen i5 at 1.2 GHz and the i5 outperformed it in raw CPU Power by around 60%
Heck an Athlon 5350 smokes the x7
Z520 the slowest ever made... back in the 2009 i get a netbook with atom z520 because i was a noob, half performance than p4 630 from 2004, that cpu was annoying slow so even the 5400 rpm hdd was not a bottleneck...
Love the vid! The Surface 3 has the X7-Z8700 btw
Great video, it will definitely get some rewatches from me (just like the last of old Atoms one)! I guess it's now time to check out some cheap Celeron based laptop... Or see how far can we push Sandy Bridge prebuilt
I have same cpu but with 4gb ram and 64GB storage its almost double the speed maybe try to find that or even x7.
2GB ram limits gpu a lot
You should really try the higher end surface 3! I would imagine the higher x7, 4 gigs and most importantly, the 128 gb ssd would make it much better for general things.
Gotta love that simcity soundtrack in the background
Just over a year ago I bought an Acer Switch S1003-12JT 10.1” 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop with Intel® x5-Z8350, 32GB eMMC, 4GB RAM & Windows 10 while it was on sale for about 250 dollars (CDN) and I've been super happy with using it as a Streaming target for Steam from my main PC and with a bluetooth Xbox One controller. For storage I use a 128gb Sandisk microsd card and it has acceptable performance for the pre-2008 era games I have on it and then run a mix of 4 player indie titles such as: Tricky Towers, Lover's in a Dangerous Space Time and Bro Force. If you can get one cheap enough this model can work much like a Switch around your house streaming from the main PC as mentioned since it has Micro HDMI out on it.
One thing I did fine that I had to do with it in Windows 10 was to lookup how to add the "Minimum CPU Speed" option to it (This also disappears after running a windows update again it seems) and set it to 100 percent otherwise the Atom wanted to not run at about half speed for some titles. I'm not sure if its a bug or not but I figured some folks are perhaps seeing a similar issue since not adding that to the registry allows the atom to run below 1ghz for a bunch of software right after you launch it on steam which in the above mentioned Bro Force made it nearly unplayable without the tweak.
Anyway, great video. :D
Yes! Finally, its here!
By the way, I also got one of these Atom Netbooks
"It's not fast, but it's slow"
oh well, that's cool
I used to run CATIA V5(R20) on an Atom (N170?) based netbook (with built in hard disk) and it worked quite well. Individual parts were fine and zooming/rotation had no problems. The problems came when there were large assemblies being moved around. I designed a playground with many, many parts and had to render a fly-through to mpg format instead of manipulating it live because it could barely do only 3-5 frames a second! Mind you, when I designed and animated a small 4-stroke engine on kinematics, it was flawless.
It got me through uni though and it never shut down on me.
I had several Atoms, including the N270, N450, D425 (with 4GB of dual-chan RAM). The D425 was actually pretty good in a small form-factor desktop used as a NAS.
The mere mention of a £200 AM4 Ryzen system has set off my ADHD* making me want to go and budget one out to tinker with and set up for my kids...
I'll stay and watch! I promise!
*I do literally legitimately have ADHD
Yeet
I made it! Great video, it's well shot, narrated, and edited!
I'm really impressed by the performance considering the teeny tiny wattage of this Atom, I feel that my experiences as a layman using Atoms may well have been informed by my ignorance about what may have actually been a bottleneck in those systems.
Damn my old phone used to have an Intel Atom
I've loads of those latter-era Atoms in a variety of form factors. I'm quite enamoured of them! Yes, they all have the 2GB/32GB RAM/eMMC limit, but I like 'em. Game-wise, they run Civ IV, Serious Sam, Doom 3, basically pre-2006 games just fine but I like them as portable field-repair devices. They're tiny! I even have a small cylinder PC about 15CM tall, same specs, HDMI output - great fun.
Love the sims background music
There are some chinese laptops that have these Cherrytrail CPUs and have slots for M.2 SSD's
It is still a great CPU.. Being budget oriented it did unfortunately often be limited by other hardware too. :/
I knew I recognized the music, sims 4!
Yeah!
I used to run these little chips as my primary laptops (and I only use laptops for 10+ years). At 4G rams and 64G eMMC, it could run win 10 1607, Office 2013 and firefox (but not chrome) at decent speed without turboboost (for max battery life).
One of the best unit I had my hands on is Lenovo Yoga Book. It has a x5 chip and better eMMC storage.
FYI: these chips runs into 5W TDP when running at turbo boost, you could use throttle stop and firmware setting to partially override the thermal wall throttle setting (kind of battle override).
loved this vid! keep up the great work
In the start of the video I was like "OOh my laptop!!"
Lol
Ahh the lenovo miix 320. It really is a piece of shit
@@baboonation5794 I have the lenovo ideapad d330 with LTE, it's a lot better than that shitbox, and cost 200$. I use it for school work.
Just wait, someone's gonna figure out how to solder in more RAM and an SSD.
I'd kill to have an SSD in my Z8350 tablet. I'm glad I only use it for reading manga and sometimes watching videos, otherwise I'd be angry that I spent money on it at all.
How about readyboost for ram. Will boot from ssd be any faster I wonder
Last netbook based atom, though I have a modern Atom powering a VM server; an Atom C3758 on a Supermicro A2SDi-8C+HLN4F mini-itx board. 8 cores paired with 64gigs of DDR4 RDIMMs and a wonderful low power draw of around 50-60W under full load for the entire system (fans, hard drives, etc). Works great!
These also make for great servers. They are still a great alternative for things like raspberry pis. Can be had for half the price, but they are at least twice as powerful.
Your music, remains a lovely touch base. :)
The last of the Atom-BRANDED chips at least. They still live on using the Celeron and Pentium Silver brands.
No, they are different the most "comparable" are the celeron SoC like braswell and all those.
I got myself a Celeron SoC and I'm baffled, it goes so much better with ssd and a gt1030! I could even play Nier Automata with the patch that corrects global illumination.
@@clochard4074 yeah the biggest bottlenecks of those chips are usually the i/o not the cores itself
ARM was really the nail in the coffin for these Atoms. They may not have x86 support, but any programs/games that could take advantage of that won't really run on it anyways.
That mostly. Other than those AAA Titles like Skyrim which are oddly playable.
@@BudgetBuildsOfficial All I need to say is, Low Spec Gamer.
Do you think AMD were partly to blame as well Catpirate, or do you think the x86 era is coming to an end?
@@TeamCGS2005 I just think for low end, x86 can't compete in terms of power consumption and efficiency.
Hello There, a great video and with the C and P Series of Intel Atom, it's still being manufactured. Cheers Peter :)
When I was a kid, I used to modify the n270 Atom with modded drivers, I got it actually boot crisis by emulating the shader model 3.0 command calls. It was a buggy mess, a rainbow sky but it worked. There may be some videos still online of the GMA 945 emulating shader pixel 3.0. All in all, I won't miss using that bloody thing, but I will miss those days!
"1080p48"? well thats a first
Never knew that ever exist why not 60
@@Bigboii7 It's double the standard film framerate, being more "cinematic" in the age of HD, high-framerate videos.
The rather interesting ones had an Nvidia ION chipset rather than being completely crippled back in the day.
I had one. A Lenovo s12. Could actually play back 1080p movies. Which is all I used it for since it was terrible at everything else
A nice cheap option for anyone interested in playing with an Atom X5-Z8350 is the AtomicPi. I use mine as a silent passively cooled desktop, though I have moved to a pi4 for that role more recently. It's still nice to have a windows machine on the desk too, and this video makes want to play with it more.
Oddly, I had a 14" HP X360 with one of the higher end Atoms with 4GB of RAM and M.2 SSD onboard and it was a very different experience. It worked well enough for development use.
1 view 3 likes im early
Tablets are better than any Intel Atom chip.
My 2ghz quad core Xiaomi Redmi 6A: Am I joke to you?
But...can it run crysis?
@@ggguys6113 if course it can't
@@TomSkarabis-oz1ep oh i see
Very nice overview! I've always liked the Atom chips; considering the power draw the theoretical performance output is very impressive. However, as you said; in the vast majority of cases they're put in some very dreary systems.
I am still using a Samsung NC210 (Atom N550) to this day and I am very happy with it. It isn't the fastest, but it does everything I need it to do. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB and put in an SSD. I run a dual boot of Lubuntu 18.04 and Windows XP Professional.
Great video, I've said for a while that atoms made more sense than an i3 for a budget laptop for a kid. Just a question, did you test whilst plugged into power to account for any power state changes?
I like your videos that include some old CPUs..... Idk why? Maybe cause I like how you absolutely shred them calling them a patato??😂
yezzir, we would LOVE to see what the top tier atom chip can do, your effort into getting your hands on one would be incredibly appreciated
I have an ASUS Transformer 100HA with a Cherrytrail CPU mated with 4GB of RAM and 128 GB internal with expansion via SD Card slot. It is a great little 2 in 1 for network diagnostics as it can fit in some tight spaces and is pretty speedy.
I had an Asus Vivotab as a daily driver notepad kind of thing for several years now. A small 8-inch tab on Atom, with full Windows and a pen is a surprisingly producive machine.
Also handled NFS Most Wanted well enough to entertain me on a long flight.
I had a cherry trail chip when they were still kind of new. I had it in a Windows 10 tablet running the original 2015 version. It held up extremely well for a device with 1 GB of low power DDR3 memory and 32 GB of EMMC storage. At the time I mostly played games along the lines of Garry's mod and it ran very well. When I switched to that machine I was moving from a Windows XP computer with four usable gigabytes of DDR2 memory, a G-Force 7300 LE, RAID IDE caviar blacks from WD, and a cedarmill Pentium 4 (Pentium D series) 930 clocked at 3 GHz THE DAMN THING COSTED AN ARM AND A LEG WHEN IT WAS NEW (though I did add a dual boot HDD over SATA with Ubuntu 12.04 later which allowed me to use my full 8 GB, didn't want to upgrade to XP 64-bit edition because I would lose media center edition features I paid for)
One note about Minecraft:
If you're installing it on windows 10, I recommend downloading the bedrock or 'Windows 10' edition from the Microsoft store instead of running java.
Because it's meant to run on multiple different device categories ranging from phones to consoles, the code is written in C/C++ and is super optimised. So even if you're cpu limited, it should run an absolute treat on these older devices!
Just thought that'd be a good heads up! Great videos as always!
Finally.... It has come.....a budget builds video
I remember a lot of these little things being popular for using to run BackTrack (Kali) linux builds. It was so as hell for most applications and only had a few usecases but you couldn't beat the price.
It pretty much became a disposable system.
Presumably that market has been gobbled up by the Raspberry π.
got a couple of hybrids running on atoms. They're perfect for streaming from xbox or pc. work flawlessly so if you are short of a tv these are great and you can watch youtube or do your interwebs on!
That sims 1 music in the background
Nice video e very nice The Sims 4 OST 👌
My first notebook was actually a netbook - the good old Asus EEE 901. This thing ran quite OK with a customized Windows XP Home ISO (nLite) but the 12 GB SSD (Phison) was just utter crap which suffered from data loss and overall had a very very bad performance. You could even play some WoW and Warcraft III (and obviously older games) on it. The form factor and keyboard was great, also I kind of liked the screen back then. While the Atom based CPUs might be weak from today's point of view, they were a decent product for their use-case back then. And for streaming some videos back in 2009/2010, they were actually quite a decent product. Netbooks were made for browsing the web and playing some video and doing light productivity stuff - and for that, they were sufficient.
I love the background music
I recently bought a obviously used and old lenovo m83 sff pc, with a 4th gen i3, single stick 4gb ram and 500gb 3.5 7.2k hdd, changed out the hdd to two ssd 240 & 500gb, and added 3 more 4gb sticks and it became really smooth sailing when doing simple tasks and running really old games, planning to get a low profile gpu ranging from either a gtx 750ti to a gtxc 1650 to pair up with it, when I eventually change my main pc platform from my i7 4790k paired with gtx 1080, and just put the i7 in there, and yes I'm aware that the pc wont be able to oc, and it doesn't matter at that point when I'm just going to use that pc for steaming to or for low power afk grind in mmorpgs that I remote into.
I love The Sims 1 music on the background :D
Have an Acer AspireOne ZG5 running as a file server, and a Toshiba NB300 netbook as a personal daily. Both have ssds installed, aspireone has a 1tb samsung 870 QVO while the nb300 has a 240GB WD Green. Both are running linux mint, so i can provide a well qualified view with regards to the performance of the older intel atom cpus.
basically while adding an ssd will drastically improve performance, these cpus are still vastly limited by the sata controllers that they are equipped with. they have so much potential given a sata 2.5 controller but are often limited by sata 1. also worth noting that dual channel ram makes very little difference, but as we all know, it helps. Get one if you need something smaller than todays offerings on the go and at a cheap price, but bear in mind, you do get what you pay for so expect only basic usage. Highly recommend setting yt resolution to 240-360p at most. playback from local storage is best at 480p, though i haven't been game enough to consider 720p playback. If there's any operating system i can recommend using on computers equipped with these cpus, It's Pixel OS, from the raspberry pi foundation. You'll get the best performance on that OS, but at the sacrifice of being able to use sleep/standby.
The first GPD Win portable PC game console thingy used these cherry trail chips, there's a large community that like to mod and alter games to get them running on those so I'd imagine that if you were to apply the same fixes to whichever games then you could get them running on this
My surface 3 with Atom is still running great. Great processor
I bought one of these with a cracked touchscreen for about 34$. Replaced the touchscreen for 19$ and I got myself a fully working tablet laptop. The Emmc was also my concern though. It is very slow and very little storage (32GB). The built in micro sd card reader is also trash. It disconnects from time to time. I had to frankenstein a micro sd card reader to its micro usb otg port and glued the reader to the back. The forums said that this problem is caused by the drivers of the chip itself (Card reader drivers are from 2006). Anyways, aside from that, I am really impressed with the battery on these things. It lasts about 5 hours at medium usage. The screen is also IPS which is great for movies. The Atom decently decodes 1080P 60fps h264 videos with very minimal stuttering probably due to it being passively cooled. Overall, its not really bad for the price.
I still have my copy of hl2 from 2004. It runs at 40-60 fps on 800p normal on the same processor. Fascinating.
About the same as CS: Source then
I have a Dell Venue 10 5056 with an Atom 8500 in it and 4GB of RAM. For a lot of what I do, it's my daily workhorse as it's small enough to fit in tight server closets and I can just plug a console cable in and get to work.
I have a Netbook with an Atom N2600.
Playing video in a browser is terrible, but it handles native media playback surprisingly well.
Only real drawback is that the board it's on has only 1gb of DDR3 soldered to the board, no additional dimm slots.
I still use it for a dedicated Kodi machine nearly 10 years after it's release.
I have a Lenovo Flex with a Celeron n4000 in it, got 2 of them for 56 bucks each because of a pricing error over the holidays. I've been using it for light stuff for the past month and I gotta say that for how low powered it is, it's really not that bad. The Flex I have has 4gb of ram so there's more give in that department, and it has a free m.2 slot (undocumented, but it's hidden underneath a ribbon cable) that I threw a 20 dollar el cheapo 256gb ssd into, which took the slower emmc out of the equation (actually the emmc in this isn't bad at all, it's faster than a regular ssd running over sata 2). It can run a lot of modern stuff at lower settings, almost anything indie and everything 2d. It streams from an XBox wonderfully too. I don't think I'd have paid full price for it, since there are Ryzen 3200u based laptops in the same price range, but for a passively cooled convertible this is not too bad at all. And the tablet mode has come in handy at times.
I used to have a dell venue 8 pro with the same specs but it ran windows 8 and I loved it
budgetbuilds: *you cant upgrade the storage*
me: *connects usb ssd*
Using an Atom based laptop, Dell Venue 10 pro 1055. I still like it because its very portable and it runs a full fledged Windows 10 operating system. It seems like mine was released in early 2015. I ran userbenchmark on it and it said for the CPU, "With an extremely low single core score, this CPU can barely handle email and light web browsing". I don't know if I'd go that far, but in Windows 10 pro 32 bit, it seems to handle web browsing and 720p RUclips playback in the latest version of Chrome just fine. Also, most 3d games from 2006 or earlier will also run well on it. I remember something like the game of STALKER shadow of Chernobyl from 2007 seems to run fine on it.
One machine using the x7-Z8750 is the GPD Pocket. It also features 8GB of ram in dual channel, so it's quite a step up memory wise.
Hi, another great quality video.
i have a tv / pc, it is one of those cheap nuc copies, called Cenovo ( yes with a C ) Cherry Z8350 Quad core with 4g ram and 64G flash memory. It was new and very cheap i think in 2017 i paid @ 140 AU
Why did i buy it, well it is new had win 10 genuine ( well apparently microsoft gives it away to all OEM manufacturers with a small 2G or less machine to stop the spread of Android )
It works fine and i wanted a quiet media player that i can keep next to the tv or in my bedroom and basically never turn if off, it does youtube sort of ok up to 720k, but it is best at 480k
I realized the flash storage was a issue, and your comment on degradation now explaines a old HP 100 mini that i still have that did use win7 but became very slow, i formated it and it took about 3 hours to install win 7, it takes almost 4 mins to boot to login. I installed linux mint and it was better, my wife used it for a while and 2 days later gave it back, so i reformated it and installed puppy 5.6, as it loaded to ram on bootup it flies so the flash storage only does one read and one write cyles on every start up, the image is about 300 meg so it should last a while, once it dies i may use it of the usb 2 interface as i do the same with a thin client ( i actually use it as a thin client, the Wyse image is on the storage card and i boot of USB for puppy )
Some machines cost way to much to try and fix, for the money you spend you can almost buy a new chromebook or bottom end laptop like a HP Stream
I guess they are basically a use and throw away item, give it a 5 year life as most times the cpu / ram / storage is soldered in like say a mac mini
Regards
George
Hagrid: You're two wizards, BudgetBuilds!
BudgetBuilds: two *watts*
I have a couple of those Chinese mini PCs with a Z8350 in them, and I currently use one as a server of sorts, for simple mundane tasks on my network, and pretty much that's all they're good for, the RAM is super slow, and often runs out, which them causes it to page, and the storage is so slow too, as you noted, that the whole machine just bogs down... You can play back video seemingly fine, but they're not that versatile other than for "low intensity computing". But at least for what I use it for, they work great, all it does is sync my Google Photos, uploads to Google Play Music when I need it to, serves as a server for a USB over IP type app, (networked optical drives anyone?).