Ever thought what would happen when you overclocked your new Asus EEE netbook? Well, we decided to give it a go. Just for the fun of it. Using a standard Asus Eee PC 1000HE netbook with Intel's Atom N280 1.66 GHz processor and its single 1GB DDR2 PC5300 memory, we scored a neat clock of 1.9 GHz using only stock cooling. With the multiplier limited to 10 - even when running Super Performance Mode on the "EEE Super Hybrid Engine" and modifying the front side bus speed with SetFSB, we reached 190 MHz before approaching the limit of the installed memory module.

With no modification at all, this freshly unpacked ASUS EEE 1000HE was enough for putting some top scores on HWbot.

Unlike the MSI Wind which allows for FSB voltage modification from within the BIOS, the Asus EEE PC 1000HE changes processor voltage on-the-fly instead. By default the 1000HE comes with 1x1GB PC5300 SO-DIMM, which was the main limiting factor in our experiment. While many listings on HWbot have used the faster memory, thus being able to overclock memory and FSB higher, we wanted to do the fastest stock clocked 1000HE with no alterations to the hardware. "What You Buy Is What You Overclock" rule applies here. We will do future modifications and we won't exclude doing some hard-core stuff, but there was no point in doing this for this particular experiment - but damn it was fun!

HWbot stats page showing six best scores in the respective category. Again, no hardware was modded.

Should be noted, when it was time to enter the benchmarks on HWbot, I wasn’t sure about the IGP used. Online sites and even some ASUS websites state 1000HE uses Intel GMA 950 clocked at 400 MHz, but from what I learned by talking to an Asus guy, it should instead be the 945GME. This should be good enough evidence that this netbook might be the incentive for netbook owners to start overclocking their "rigs" [Can you seriously call netbook a "rig"? Ed.].

Look at the scores above just as an introduction to the subject of 1000HE. We like this netbook and we'll see how long it will last under various… let's just say that future experiments will be interesting.