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Chrispy_ wrote:

Quad-core Bay Trail will not be the bottleneck, nor will the 1GB, for the purposes of displaying a website. I have my answer, in that 1GB/16GB storage is enough to run Windows 10, but 32GB is recommended.

I was surprised how good my Bay Trail (3735F?) tab was at browsing.  I'd like to try Cherry Trail sometime, just don't really care anymore.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Quad-core Bay Trail will not be the bottleneck, nor will the 1GB, for the purposes of displaying a website.

Sweet Christmas! Going through the process of booting the device to get to the website is more than enough tech torture for one lifetime.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Arguing about performance

There is no argument as there is no performance.

End User wrote:

Sweet Christmas! Going through the process of booting the device to get to the website is more than enough tech torture for one lifetime.

Based on what experience?

It is really not an issue. Cold boot time for my Atom/Windows tablet is 15 seconds, for the HTPC it's 137 seconds and the main box is 73 -- on the runs I just did to have numbers to support what I know.

I'm not going to cold boot the last 2 into Linux or the other 4 x86 boxes in the house right now, but I have high confidence that the tablet wins by far on that metric.

End User wrote:

There is no argument as there is no performance.

Based on what experience?

PS: boot time is a more relevant metric than Cinebench (or HPL...) so this is progress, but even if the Atom machine did not win at booting, the most important metric is portability, where it certainly also wins!

EU, you seem to be completely out of touch with what these things are capable of:

End User wrote:

booting the device to get to the website is more than enough tech torture for one lifetime

Atom Z3735F/32GB budget Windows tablet, vs Macbook Air bootup comparison
8 seconds from power-on to login screen is enough tech torture for one lifetime?

As for performance, there are plenty of videos of people showing the performance of these things but when it comes to web content they seem indistinguishable to Android tablets and significantly faster than any laptop/desktop running a mechanical drive. If it's CPU/GPU performance the first three youtube results for "Atom Z3735 gaming" are quite surprising. Granted, newer AAA titles aren't running particularly well but I'm actually startled they're running at all, let alone playably. This tablet costs less than most of those AAA titles cost at launch.

Don't forget, the competition in this form factor is not a desktop i7, it's a 4.5W Intel CoreM with 24EU graphics that are only 50% faster than the budget Atom's GT1 graphics, so it's not as if spending 15x more cash is going to make these run much better. If you're buying a low-budget tablet for high-end desktop AAA gaming, you want to get checked out by a qualified psychiatrist first.

Chrispy_ wrote:

So, there are some ridiculous offers for Intel quad-core Atom tablets with 1GB RAM and an decent IPS screen and windows 10 for like £40 ($60).

The problem is that they only have 16GB storage + SD expansion. Obviously Windows comes shipped in a working state on these 16GB eMMC drives, but does anyone have any actual experience using W10 on something so underpowered?

I have such a tablet - 1 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC and a 1024x600; specifically, this one. The storage is just about OK for Windows, though you'll need an SD card plugged in to apply any Windows upgrades (such as the Anniversary Edition upgrade); and you'll want to run disk cleanup on C: once things are up and running. The tablet is fine for light browsing, YouTube, etc. (bear in mind I use Edge).  
I find that the screen is the weakest link of the whole package - despite my tablet claiming to have an IPS screen, viewing angles are worse than some TN screens I've seen. And the resolution also makes it difficult to use when working on any UI-heavy apps (e.g. Settings).
On the other hand, I also have a HP Stream 7 with more storage, and - more importantly - a vastly better screen that improves usability by bounds.
So why did I buy such a cheap and crappy tablet in the first place? Because it came with an Office 365 license that allowed me to extend my subscription by 9 months. Factoring in the cost of the subscription, the tablet's hardware/OS cost itself worked out to $20 - which was low enough for a playtoy, something I may repurpose as some manner of an always-on appliance.

Yeah, I learned from the netbook era that Windows is generally horrible with anything less than 768 vertical pixels. 1024x768 is effectively the minimum usable resolution if you don't want to deal with OK and Cancel buttons off the bottom of the screen for common windows dialogs, at least that's how it was with W7 and the W10 technical preview.

I'm hoping 1280x800 is fine since 1280 is a highly compatible website width and 800p is enough vertical area to avoid any compatibility issues that I'm aware of. Arrives tomorrow so I guess I'll have fun poking about with it as a cheap toy.

Knowing that I needed 14.5gb free to install 1511 on my Venue 32gb, I'm going to guess that Win10 on a 16gb tablet while possible isn't really worth the effort.

Chrispy_ wrote:

I'm hoping 1280x800 is fine since 1280 is a highly compatible website width and 800p is enough vertical area to avoid any compatibility issues that I'm aware of. Arrives tomorrow so I guess I'll have fun poking about with it as a cheap toy.

I've played with a 1280x800 8" Windows tablet at a store - and I think that really is a great sweet spot. The extra inch of screen size makes the resolution comfortable to use. You can toggle between 100% and 125% scaling to see what suits your personal preference.

I'm 4 hours in and I'm amazed at the performance actually. I would have expected this to be a £200 product given the specs/speed vs the Android and Chromebook competition.

The Atom is overkill from what I can tell. Outside of gaming it's largely idle for web/email/youtube. 3D AAA gaming kinda sucks, but I was expecting no less.

I have used 10GB/29GB of the windows-formatted storage and Crystal Diskmark says it's plenty fast enough - 200MB/s read, 50MB/s write, 6500IOPS. It's not a great desktop SSD but it'll still run circles around anything mechanical as an OS drive. I found a 128GB MicroSD lying around which is giving me 15MB/s as a storage drive. I could buy something faster but it'll do and for the princely sum of £0 I think it offers excellent performance/£

The screen is really good in terms of brightness and viewing angles. 1280x800 means the DPI is low for a mobile device (I'm using a 5.5" 2560x1440 OLED phone) but it's seemingly pin-sharp at arms reach and 180dpi requires nose-to-screen action before my eyes can resolve individual pixels.

The speakers are terrible, but what did anyone expect. They're exactly as terrible as any smartphone's speakers and that's what earbuds are for.

Gaming is something I wasn't expecting it to do, but there are a few things I will be doing with it. 
1) Finish the Deponia trilogy. It's point and click, perfect for tablets.
2) XCOM:EU expansion. It seems to run okay, believe it or not!
3) System Shock 2; I never played it through to completion. I KNOW RIGHT?!
4) Quake3 Arena because I still need to join a LAN game of that occasionally and smackdown my inferiors.

As a side note, Starcraft II runs. I'm not going to keep it installed because it's such a huge install and the screen is probably a bit too small for comfort.

I hate to break it to you Chrispy, but that processor has a low number in a random synthetic benchmark.  This means it's useless, and can't possibly be doing the things you're seeing it do.

Stop imagining things and throw it in the trash already.

Chrispy_ wrote:

EU, you seem to be completely out of touch with what these things are capable of:

End User wrote:

booting the device to get to the website is more than enough tech torture for one lifetime

Atom Z3735F/32GB budget Windows tablet, vs Macbook Air bootup comparison
8 seconds from power-on to login screen is enough tech torture for one lifetime?

Absolutely unbearable. It is double the boot time of my Core M laptop.

Pretending that Atom CPUs using Windows 10 don't have serious performance issues is just nuts.

Chrispy_ wrote:

If you're buying a low-budget tablet for high-end desktop AAA gaming, you want to get checked out by a qualified psychiatrist first.

If you're buying a low-budget Windows 10 tablet equipped with an Atom processor your are throwing your money away. Intel knew that and that is why they killed the Atom off.

Topinio wrote:

End User wrote:

There is no argument as there is no performance.

Based on what experience?

Based on the lack of CPU power that the Atom offers. Any task that requires CPU power is fcuked. The entire point of running Windows is to harness CPU/GPU power. Once you lose that then Windows has nothing to offer.

I noticed that there was often lag when switching between tabs in Chrome (even with just five or six open), and when I fired up a 1080p video in YouTube, the whole system ground to a halt for a couple seconds. Even after it finished buffering, playback wasn't always smooth, and while the movie was playing, the computer was less responsive in doing anything else.

Throwing what money away? You seem to be forgetting that this is a $50 device on which I can VPN to servers and access my Steam library in something that fits in my back pocket. $50 includes the Windows license, the screen, battery, charger, USB cord, storage, motherboard as well as the Atom, distribution costs and profit. How much of that do you think the Atom costs? I also think that review you linked is disingenous of you since the review is talking about a $465 device. Yeah, at that price I'd be disappointed with the Atom too!

End User wrote:

If you're buying a low-budget Windows 10 tablet equipped with an Atom processor your are throwing your money away. Intel knew that and that is why they killed the Atom off.

Oh, please stop with the FUD; You're implying that the cancelled Broxton/Willow-Trail line is sign that the whole architecture being killed off. That couldn't be further from the truth. Intel are still launching and manufacturers are still producing Goldmont-based products because the architecture is here to stay. The only thing you don't see anymore is the smartphone-specific Willow-Trail since that market is not profitable enough for Intel with all the ARM vendors, and Microsoft's x86 on ARM announcement is more clue of which direction the very low end of the market is headed.

Apollo lake is live and kicking with tablet models already in the market. Expect to see more of these low-budget Windows 10 tablets/chromebooks/netbooks with the same Goldmont architecture as these Atoms (that you clearly have an irrational hatred for) well into 2018.

End User wrote:

Topinio wrote:

Based on what experience?

Based on the lack of CPU power that the Atom offers. Any task that requires CPU power is fcuked. The entire point of running Windows is to harness CPU/GPU power. Once you lose that then Windows has nothing to offer.

Almost all tasks on almost all deployed Windows boxes do not fit into that worldview, sorry to break it to you.

Sure, the little guy doesn't lift like the E3-1270 v5/32GB/R9 290X/XL2730Z box in current games or synthetic benchmarks. So what?

In effect, End User seems to be complaining that a golf cart doesn't perform like a Tesla...