ASUS Sea Shell 1215B
Category : Notebooks / Tablets
Published by Marc Büchel on 13.07.11
With the Sea Shell 1215B, ASUS has a 12 inch netbook in its portfolio which features AMD APU. The C50 clocks at 1.0 GHz which is that much but fairly enough for office applications and every day usage. Furthermore the thing is quite appealing and therefore good looking. 
On the following pages we will show you the strenghts and weaknesses of the Eee PC 1215B netbook from ASUS.
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Preview
With the 1215B netbook which belongs to the Sea Shell series, ASUS has a nice looking product in its portfolio. Especially the cover which has been kept in silver makes this little thing look promising. Generally the devices is nicely built although it's aggressively priced. Thefore the expectations shouldn't be sky high.
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Specifications / Chassis
| CPU | AMD Brazos C50 1.0GHz (dual core) Processor |
| Operating System | Windows 7 Home Premium |
| Chipset | Intel HM55 Express |
| Memory | DDR3, 2 x SO-DIMM, 2GB/4GB |
| Display | 12.1" LED Backlight WXGA (1366x76 Screen |
| Graphics card | AMD Radeon HD 6250 |
| Hard drive | 2.5" SATA 250GB/320GB/500GB HDD |
| Video Camera | 0.3 Mega Pixel web camera |
| Connectors | 1 x VGA Connector 3 x USB 2.0 1 x USB 3.0 *1 1 x LAN RJ-45 1 x HDMI 2 x Audio Jack (Headphone/Mic-In) 1 x Card Reader : SD/ SDHC/ SDXC/ MMC |
| Audio | Hi-Definition Audio CODEC Stereo Speakers High Quality Mic |
| Battery | 6 cells, 56 Wh |
| Dimensions | 296 x 203 x 38 mm (W x D x H) |
Chassis
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Display / Input Devices
Display
Input Devices
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Test setup
Regarding our notebook reviews we use a practical approach. To get a detailed impresson of the device the tester uses it to work with. In case of gaming notebooks it replaces the testers gaming PC during the time of the test. These methods allow us to provide detailed user experience to you.Regarding performance benchmarks - which are listed below - we don't go very deep. What we do, is that we use benchmarking software which over the years have established as standards for reviewing purposes. Furthermore the specific game benchmarks give insight to the playability of recent games.
Benchmarkprogramme
- Futuremark PCMark 7
- Total Score
- Video playback and transcoding / Video playback Score
- Video playback and transcoding / Video transcoding - downscaling Score
- System storage - gaming / System storage - gaming Score
- Graphics - DirectX 9 / Graphics - DirectX 9 Score
- Image manipulation / Image manipulation Score
- System storage - importing pictures / System storage - importing pictures Score
- Web browsing and decrypting / Web browsing Score
- Web browsing and decrypting / Data decrypting Score
- System storage - Windows Defender / System storage - Windows Defender Score
- Total Score
- Battery Eater
- Classic
- Idle
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PCMark 7 - Video Playback / Downscaling / Transcoding / Storage
PCMark 7 is a benchmark suite which consists of 20 different workloads. The following results reflect the PCMark 7's standard selection, which provides a good insight regarding overall system performance. For a comfortable presentation we chose to split the results onto three different sites.| Futuremark PCMark 7 | Punkte |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 843 |
| Acer eM 250 | 419 |
| Video playback and transcoding / Video playback | fps |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 19.61 |
| Acer eM 250 | 2.71 |
| Video playback and transcoding / Video transcoding - downscaling | KByte/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 840.73 |
| Acer eM 250 | 180.85 |
| System storage - gaming / System storage - gaming | MByte/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 3.26 |
| Acer eM 250 | 3.27 |
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DirectX 9 / Image Manipulation / Importing Pictures
| Graphics - DirectX 9 / Graphics - DirectX 9 | fps |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 5.75 |
| Acer eM 250 | 0.62 |
| Image manipulation / Image manipulation | Mpx/s |
| Acer eM 250 | 2.14 |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 1.87 |
| System storage - importing pictures / System storage - importing pictures | MByte/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 4.62 |
| Acer eM 250 | 4.37 |
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Web browsing / Data decryption / Windows Defender
| Web browsing and decrypting / Web browsing | Pages/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 1.91 |
| Acer eM 250 | 1.49 |
| Web browsing and decrypting / Data decryption | MByte/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 10.81 |
| Acer eM 250 | 6.29 |
| System storage - Windows Defender / System storage - Windows Defender | MByte/s |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 1.23 |
| Acer eM 250 | 1.15 |
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Battery Eater / Power Consumption
| Load | min |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 3 h 52 min |
| Acer eM 250 | 2 h 16 min |
| Idle | min |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 5 h 58 min |
| Acer eM 250 | 3 h 41 min |
| Load | Watt |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 27 |
| Idle | Watt |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 15 |
| Charging Battery | Watt |
| ASUS Eee PC 1215B | 48 |
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Conclusion
| General | + | - | |
| Generally the ASUS Sea Shell 1215B leaves a good impression and it is a solid netbook. We especially liked the big display and its batter which is able to power the device for almost four hours under load and six hours in idle. On the other end of the scale there is the touchpad which demands for improvment with a next revision. The fact that the cursor tends to jump all over the display can become very annoying. | - Battery | - Touchpad | |
| Display / Input devices | + | - | |
| The big display with a resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels is very nice and comfortable to work with. Unfortualtely we don't only have positive feedback concerning the screen. The contrast for example is poor. Therefore it is difficult to separate different shades of gray for example. On the other hand there is the displays brightness which again is good and on a competitive level. | - Display size - Readability |
- Display contrast - Display colors - Touchpad pressure point |
|
| Performance | + | - | |
| Equipped with a AMD C50 APU which comes with a clock speed of 1.0 GHz one shouldn't expect miracles from the ASUS Sea Shell 1215B. Therefore it isn't possible to watch Full-HD content. The maximum is 720p. Generally the performance is enough for office applications and standard every day usage, which means surfing in the internet is absolutely no problem. | |||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| If you should be looking for a netbook with a big 12 inch display then it's time for you to take a closer look a the ASUS Sea Shell 1215B, but you definitely should be very demanding regarding the input devices because the touchpad really has the potential to become annoying over time. | |||
| Rating | |||
| With the Eee Pad Sea Shell 1215B ASUS could have scored five stars but the touchpad really needs to be improved and the displays contrast is poor which results in three out of five possible stars. | |||
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