Asus has been shipping a program called the Super Hybrid Engine with all of its Intel Atom powered netbooks since day one. The utility lets users overclock or underclock their machines to provide better battery life or a performance boost depending on their needs. The 11.6 inch Eee PC 1101HA is the first one that lets you customize the overclock values.

A few weeks ago, we spotted a setting in the user manual that made it clear that users would be able to adjust a BIOS setting to modify the values used by the Super Hybrid Engine. Now Notebook Italia has had a chance to test a working Eee PC 1101HA unit, and reports on the details of this BIOS setting.

Apparently you can choose from 5 settings: 15%, 20%, 25%, 30%, and 32%. At the highest setting, the notebook is a bit unstable. But you can adjust the setting to overclock the Atom Z520 CPU by about 30%. At that setting, the Intel Atom Z520 processor, which  normally runs at 1.33GHz will run at 1.73GHz.

Of course, you’ll reduce your battery life and your computer will get a lot hotter if you run it at 1.73GHz. But that may be a small price to pay to squeeze a tiny bit of extra performance out of the CPU, in some situations, anyway.

via Portable Monkey