HP Mini 5102: This Netbook Means Business

Multimedia Support with the Crystal HD

The BCM70012 is the slightly older version of the Crystal HD, but as far as we can tell there isn’t a huge difference with the newer BCM70015. With the card installed along with the latest 3.5.0 Broadcom drivers, we were all set to see what the Mini 5102 could do with our video suite.

If you weren’t aware, while it’s possible—just!—to view 720p H.264 encoded videos on an N450 CPU, it requires a highly efficient decoder like CoreAVC to avoid dropping frames. That’s what we normally use for our video playback/battery rundown test, and CPU usage hovers at around 80% with spikes up to 100% on occasion. Here’s what Perfmon looks like with a standard Pine Trail N450:

That’s a run with the HP 5102 without using the Crystal HD decoder. Here’s what happens with our same test video once we install the BCM70012 and enable the Broadcom decoder. For our tests, we’re using Media Player Classic Home Cinema and a 7Mbps (average) x264 video encode.

Enabling the Crystal HD decoder brings CPU usage down to 25% on average, with spikes up to just 40%—a pretty drastic reduction. What’s more, even 1080p video becomes playable on the Mini 5102 with the Broadcom decoder. Here’s what things look like before using CoreAVC:

CPU utilization is 98% average, and there are constant frame drops and stuttering audio. Our 12Mbps 1080p x264 video is absolutely unwatchable on a single-core Atom CPU right now, unless it gets some serious help. (Our understanding is that N550 with its dual-cores is able to handle this sort of video, albeit barely.) We’ve seen in the past that NVIDIA’s ION can offload H.264 decoding and provide smooth playback, so let’s see how the Crystal HD fares:

Rather impressive, really: CPU utilization is only slightly higher than the 720p video. Perhaps it’s a matter of only driving a 1024x600 panel, but at least you don’t need to worry about re-encoding videos for playback on a netbook.

So H.264 video playback worked well with the proper software and drivers. However, there’s more to multimedia than watching videos off your hard drive. What about surfing some popular video sites that use Flash 10.1 videos? Without the Crystal HD we’re able to watch SD videos… barely. 360p Hulu movies are just about smooth in fullscreen mode, but 480p really struggles. Here’s Hulu 480p without the Crystal HD:

We’re at 85% CPU usage and dropping frames… video is playing back at about 15FPS I’d guess (unfortunately, FRAPS wouldn’t give me a frame rate for some reason without the CrystalHD). Switch to hardware accelerated Flash 10.1 playback with the Broadcom chip and we get…

Okay, CPU usage dropped to 63%, and according to the Broadcom DTS_Info utility the Crystal HD decoder is active. The problem is, frame rates are still at around 15FPS. Ugh. YouTube didn’t fare much better; 480p video worked great fullscreen and enabled the Crystal HD; 360p worked fine but did all the work on the CPU. Meanwhile, 720p was dropping a lot of frames and running at anywhere between 10FPS and 18FPS (instead of 24FPS for the source video). Bumping up to 1080p didn’t change things—for better or for worse, interestingly enough. So our testing with YouTube HD was a failure; CPU usage dropped from nearly 100% to around 65%, but video playback wasn’t smooth at all.

What’s difficult to answer is whether this is a problem with the Broadcom decoder and Flash 10.1 video in general, or if it’s just an incompatibility with the Mini 5102 and the BCM70012. I started threads on the Adobe Flash forums, MyHPMini forums, and even tried emailing Broadcom support, all with no solution. There’s a thread here from the 10.1 beta that suggests changing the IGP memory from DVMT to a static 128MB might fix the problem, but unfortunately that’s not an option on the 5102 BIOS. Of course, the better fix would be if the Broadcom drivers and/or Flash properly allocated memory via DVMT and avoided this issue, but given Flash 10.1 is out of beta and the Broadcom drivers are at least a couple months old, I’m not holding my breath.

Something else worth noting is that the BCM70012 definitely gets hot when it’s in use. The bottom-right area of the palm rest is where the mini-PCIe slot sits, and with the Crystal HD installed and active temperatures can hit 43C (110F) after 5-10 minutes. It’s not hot enough to burn you, but it is uncomfortably warm and there’s no real airflow to that section of the chassis.

For now, Flash 10.1 support on Atom netbooks continues to be a far better experience with NVIDIA’s ION platform. I’ll try to get a different netbook to play with and see if the Crystal HD works properly there, or I may try doing Linux on the Mini 5102 to see how that goes since Broadcom released the drivers to open source. If all you want is better playback in MPC-HC, the Broadcom chip works as advertised. If you want HDMI output or Flash support, stick with ION (or just upgrade to i3/i5 ULV). Given my experience with the 5102, though, I wouldn’t spend the extra $45 for the upgrade.