AMD Fusion E-350 vs Intel Atom D525

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Pure performance tests show that these two processors aren't really designed for much more than office use. Surfing the Internet, viewing and sorting through photos or chatting online pose no problem at all and don't slow things down in any way. Here's what we found:

Once again, AMD comes out on top in our benchmark tests but, as above, the results are worth taking with a pinch of salt. Although the E-350 visibly performs a little better than the D525, neither processor can cope with the very latest games, as they just don't have the power. Even with the graphics turned down to the lowest level you end up with a kind of 'slideshow' instead of a smooth flowing game. Neither platform is genuinely compatible with 3D games either.

800x600 'high quality'

 

When idle, both of our test machines had exactly the same power consumption of 29 watts for the whole computer (measured at the mains connection). However, the Atom comes out on top when the processors are working: it only consumes 37 watts while the AMD trails behind with 44 watts.

 

For this test, we used ripped Blu-ray files stored on the internal hard drive of our test computers. This posed no problem at all for the Intel D525, which breezed its way through even the most heavyweight video files, including Baraka, which peaks at 50 Mbps.

The AMD E-350 shows its limits with the Baraka file though, with a few sporadic glitches. However, the heaviest parts of Avatar were seamless and glitch-free.

We then tried out some x246-encoded 1080p videos in the MKV format. This type of video file is much more difficult for the systems to handle, and can even be problematic for specialist media centres. Once again, the Intel chip had no problem ensuring smooth playback no matter what film we tried playing.

 

Technically, the AMD handles video decoding well, but we did notice a few random glitches and slow-downs. The important word here is 'random' as such problems don't always occur at the same time or the same place in the video. When we played back a scene we'd previously seen glitch it looked completely different the second time around. This could perhaps point to software rather than hardware bugs, or problems with the drivers.

Don't forget that for both systems you'll need to activate video decoding in the graphics part of the playback software. Otherwise, the processors won't be able to play 1080p or even 720p video smoothly.

With both processors, playing 1080p videos on sites like YouTube is smooth and  problem-free. Beware though, as you'll need the very latest version of Adobe Flash to ensure compatibility with GPU acceleration. Without this, the videos won't be entirely smooth. Note that our tests were carried out with Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome 10.