While the Eee will be perfectly capable at handling older games, we found that anything newer tended to fall flat on its face for several reasons. First and foremost is the Intel GMA900 graphics chip -– second is the fact that the Eee’s processor is actually running at 630MHz instead of the alleged 900MHz that has been such a popular number until this point.
The Eee’s shipping BIOS –- and the recently updated version -– both lock the front-side bus to only 70MHz, bringing the processor and memory clocks down with it. There is a “leaked†BIOS floating around from ASUS’s international site, but it caused the Eee to become unstable to the point where tests would not reliably complete. ^
Ouch! That’s an ugly glitch to an otherwise enthralling machine. With the motherboard technology we have in proven state today, I see no reason not to have a faster bus and possibly even 1 GHz processor. It won’t consume that much more memory. The one area Asus does get to play around is with internal design within its specification, and a little more creative engineering here could make this machine far more usable.