Considering buying Asus Eee PC 1201N - WINE perf. question

[zorgoth]

The Asus Eee PC 1201n is a netbook that has nVidia ION and a dual core 1.6 GHz intel Atom processor. I am considering buying this as I do a lot of travel and don't play the latest games or anything like that. The only game which is any question that I am concerned about playing is World of Warcraft. Under Windows this is supposed to run very well, but I have heard that WINE is CPU intensive, and the atom is not a powerful processor. Will performance under WINE be comparable to the Windows performance on the Asus Eee PC 1201N (from what I've read the windows performance is very acceptable)?

I may just get a $500 notebook otherwise (I'd rather have the lighter weight though), although World of Warcraft is not my top priority and a lighter portable machine would be very nice. I could also of course just suck it up and use Windows for WoW.

[vitamin]

Will performance under WINE be comparable to the Windows performance on the Asus Eee PC 1201N (from what I've read the windows performance is very acceptable)?

If WoW will work fine in OpenGL mode under Wine - should be pretty close to native, video driver permitting. And since this is Nvidia driver should be good as well (not without standard software problems of course).

However check AppDB see what performance people get with WoW and if it's reliable running in OpenGL mode.

[jeffz]

The Asus Eee PC 1201n is a netbook that has nVidia ION and a dual core 1.6 GHz intel Atom processor. I am considering buying this as I do a lot of travel and don't play the latest games or anything like that. The only game which is any question that I am concerned about playing is World of Warcraft. Under Windows this is supposed to run very well, but I have heard that WINE is CPU intensive, and the atom is not a powerful processor. Will performance under WINE be comparable to the Windows performance on the Asus Eee PC 1201N (from what I've read the windows performance is very acceptable)?

I may just get a $500 notebook otherwise (I'd rather have the lighter weight though), although World of Warcraft is not my top priority and a lighter portable machine would be very nice. I could also of course just suck it up and use Windows for WoW.

This one seems to have an integrated nvidia 9400M, rather than an Intel card, so performance might actually be acceptable with the nvidia binary drivers. Though, the only way you're going to find out is by comparison or trying it out.

Whether or not Wine is CPU intensive varies from program to program, Wine version to Wine version. For a 3D program like WoW, you'd expect a lot of the work to be done the video card rather than in software.

I guess your worst case scenario is using Windows if things don't work out.

[Thunderbird]

To get an idea of performance a single-core atom at 1.6GHz is similar to a pentium3 1GHz (or perhaps the atom is even a little slower). It depends a bit on how well Wow takes advantage of multi-core CPUs but I think it does well. I would expect the game to be playable but not sure at what resolution but it should run. I don't think the OS makes any difference in this case.