Netbook Network

SuperHyridEngine is a power efficiency tool that can be found on most Asus laptops and netbooks. It’s set to launch on startup, and you’ll find it in your taskbar tray. Right clicking on it provides four options: Super Performance, High Performance, Power Saving, and Auto. Asus advertises a “35% gain in battery life” using SuperHybridEngine – but it’s never really stated how it works. After playing around with overclocking my Eee 1005HA, I’ve figured out how it works. Read on to find out!

The basic idea behind SHE is this: Super Performance overclocks your processor, High Performance clocks your processor at its standard clock, and Power Saving underclocks your processor. (If you don’t understand what overclocking is, check out the Wikipedia page). Auto mode will switch between High Performance and Power Saving: if you plug the netbook/laptop in, it’ll switch to High Performance, if you’re running on battery, it’ll switch to Power Saving.

For most netbooks which have 1.6 Ghz processors, Power Saving mode will underclock your processor to about 1.44 Ghz. Granted, it won’t run as fast, but you’ll definitely save battery life – I saw at least improvements of 30 minutes on my Eee 1005HA. However, on higher end laptops, it won’t do anything. That’s right, Power Saving mode does nothing for newer netbooks such as my Eee 1215n. Note that there may be some exceptions, but Core Temp saw no change in processor clock for my Eee 1215n, which sports an Intel Atom D525 Dual-Core CPU with each core clocked at 1.8 Ghz.

High Performance mode will clock your processor at its standard rate. That means, for most netbooks, you’ll be getting the standard 1.6 Ghz. “High Performance” doesn’t really mean anything, a netbook is a netbook and it’s not exactly blazing fast, but it’s faster than Power Saving.

Super Performance will overclock your processor to push out more frames when you’re watching a HQ video or playing a game. It’ll push your processor to about 0.5 Ghz more than the standard clock rate, and I believe that applies to all netbooks/laptops armed with SHE. In terms of everyday use, though, Super Performance actually doesn’t really help much at all. You won’t notice a very big difference in performance, and your motherboard will heat up like crazy (heat dissipation is a huge issue on smaller netbooks) – so I’d recommend you stay away from Super Performance unless you really need it.

For me, I have SHE disabled on startup. I still have it installed, but Power Saving won’t give me any minutes more with my battery life. In the rare case that I run it, I use it for Super Performance as the availability of overclocking tools for newer netbooks are lacking.