ASUS Transformer Book T100 Review: Redefining the Entry-Level Windows Notebook
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 18, 2013 12:00 AM ESTCPU Performance
The Atom Z3740 in the T100 features a 9% lower base clock and 22.5% lower max turbo frequency than the Z3770 we previewed back at IDF. Given how good of a job Bay Trail does turboing up to max frequencies under normal use, I’d expect proportionally lower scores in our tests.
I’ll start with our cross platform browser based benchmarks before moving on to a look at the Z3740 vs. Z3770.
Note for all of these benchmarks I’ve used Google’s Chrome browser. IE11 integrates well into the modern UI of Windows 8.1 but is otherwise a pretty terrible browser by comparison. I think the modern UI Chrome experience on 8.1 isn’t as good, but it’s a better/faster/less-finicky option. Out of all of our tests only SunSpider seems to run quicker under IE11, whereas Chrome wins everywhere else. I think it’s a bit insane to switch between browsers based on the benchmark being run, so we’re sticking with Chrome across the board.
Lightly threaded performance is actually quite comparable to the Chromebook 11, which was a bit surprising. Throw a multitasking workload at the two notebooks and you'll separate the boys from the men though:
Chrome under Chrome OS performs extremely well for obvious reasons. But here the T100's additional cores and solid memory interface really come in handy when multitasking, there's hardly any performance penalty for this sort of multitasking on Bay Trail while the dual-core Cortex A15 based Chromebook needs serious help.
The T100 remains extremely competitive compared to the Chromebook 11 and definitely compared to Android tablets.
Next up is putting the Atom Z3740's performance in perspective compared to our earlier FFRD data:
In all of these tests we see nearly perfect scaling compared to the Atom Z3770. Turbo frequencies are regularly hit when under load, and as a result see see proportionally lower performance from the T100. I would’ve liked to have seen the Z3770 used in the T100, but not if it meant a higher price, an optional dock or a worse display.
GPU Performance
I didn’t have a ton of time to go through gaming performance on the T100, but with a quarter of the EUs of Ivy Bridge it’s clear that you shouldn’t expect a GPU monster out of Bay Trail. In our cross platform graphics tests however the T100 is quite competitive, although not industry leading by any means.
I did see some choppy animations at times and indications that the GPU (or its drivers) weren’t up to snuff, but that’s exclusively in classic desktop mode. In the modern UI, the Atom Z3740 was very smooth.
Storage Performance
Our Android IO tests rely on Androbench with a relatively limited LBA span. I increased the difficulty of the test a bit under Windows 8.1 but still kept it reasonable since we are dealing with eMMC solutions. I’m testing across a 1GB LBA span and testing for a period of 1 minute, which is an ok balance between difficulty of workload and sensitivity to the fact that we’re evaluating low-class SSDs here.
Sequential read and write performance is competitive with the high-end examples we’ve seen in the Android space. Random read performance is similarly good, while random write performance is appreciably better than what we’re used to in Android tablets. It is good to see ASUS/Intel/Microsoft concerned about random write performance, but I’d still like to see a 5 - 10x increase in these numbers with a focus on sustained performance before I’m truly happy.
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tential - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Or they could have released it at $360, and taken that extra 10 dollars to add the top of the line baytrail and 4GB of ram.....It's just ugh......
takeship - Tuesday, October 22, 2013 - link
I'm curious to what extent the last few dollars corner cutting $350 price tag was influenced by their experience with the Vivo models last year. That hybrid AFAIK was $400 with the last gen Atom, and sold quite poor.gadjade - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
Was not impressed with the battery life and keyboard. I might wait for the Dell Venue 11 Pro or maybe I would add more to my budget and go for the Lenovo YOGA 11 2.sri_tech - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
How is battery life is bad when it lasts nearly the same as ipad mini and better than nexus 10 and other galaxy tabs?Remember, the battery test was done with keyboard attached which is not the case for other tablets.
Dayo - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I agree, plus the keyboard in this case does not have any additional battery in it like the Acer W510 keyboard that adds another 9 hrs of battery life, but heavy. This device as tested yielded 11 hrs. That is very good battery life.jasonelmore - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
ignore these people. They never buy much, just talk a lot.Dayo - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
11 hours of battery life is not impressive? I take it the Lenovo Yoga 11.2 last for 2 daysmonstercameron - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
what about a comparison with the a6-1450 temash?sherlockwing - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
AMD didn't given Anandtech a platform with a6-1450 on it. So they couldn't test it.Antiflash - Friday, October 18, 2013 - link
I had the T100 preordered but canceled to wait for the new Venue 8 and venue 11. I do not know which will be better but hopefully they will review them here to decide