After a long wait the first Samsung NC20 benchmarks have turned up over at netbooknews.de as our friend Sascha has put one of the first machines through its paces. Despite all of VIA's claims, it seems like the new platform isn't an Atom beater, yet.

The issue seems to be VIA's inferior chipset, as the VX800 can't keep up with Intel's old 945GSE, which was kind of expected considering earlier reviews of the VIA Nano mini-ITX motherboards. The NC20 was pitched against Samsung's own NC10 which is a standard Atom netbook and although the NC20 does come up on top in many of the tests, there's no clear overall winner.

In terms of battery life the NC20 impresses, as it manages about 5.5h doing simple web browsing and it even manages 4h of in a battery torture test. It doesn't fair quite as well in 3DMark as the 945GSE chipset seems to have a better 3D graphics engine (if you can call it that) than the VX800, although the NC20 comes out on top in 3DMark06, although the scores are to low to even matter.

Moving on to PCMark05 the VIA Nano processor beats the Atom N270 hands down in the CPU test, but the chipset means poor memory performance. As we already know, the VIA Nano is the better choice in Cinebench R10, so no big surprises here. Interestingly the VIA Nano seems to suffer in WinRAR when multi-threading is enabled, as the CPU puts in a better results in single-threaded mode. In Sisoft Sandra the VIA processor comes up on top in the FPU tests but suffers in the integer and memory tests.

It seems like VIA is desperately in need of a new, improved chipset and if they can manage to deliver this, then Intel's Atom platform might be in for some competition, despite Intel's slightly upgraded N280 processor and the improved GN40 chipset option.

You can check out the full results here (in German) spread over three pages