MSI Wind U100 Review Part 2

Having seen enough pics of MSI’s new elegant take as the answer to ASUS Eee series. Expectations upon revealing of real performance of such elegant minis is highly likely. Read ahead to get more!

In the first place, a view of Intel Atom is an of-course!

Simply as CPU-Z puts it, Intel Atom is powered on quite low voltage. Big power saver as Atom may be, its performance isn’t quite a blow. Calculating 1M in Super-Pi requires one and a half minutes, too much time for users in present age to feel great. However, such a CPU is truly adequate for all your daily use, by which I am talking about sending e-mails, browsing Internet, listening to some music, viewing pictures or even editing some, in of course easy ways, and things like this. Any anticipation on playing back HD content or playing FPS games would be simply unrealistic.

Nevertheless, equipped with SSE3 and SSSE3 IAs, Atom is able to do something complex to a extent that we should expect around the point that a 1.6G Atom would perform somewhere around that of a 1.0 to 1.2G Pentium M [Dothan].

Wind tested on PCMark and 3DMarks.

Although quite shabby at 3D performance tests, you are still guaranteed to have a very good view of what you should see to any extent that any discrete display adapters can manage to produce.

Now comes the time to look into Wind’s drive, a quite common one, not able to take any SSD counterpart in potential but quite replaceable and much less expensive.

There is one very special feature to MSI Wind U100, that is overclocking!

Nobody would expect such a mini laptop could overclock, right? We’ve been knowing MSI’s overclocking habit on mobile platform, but still MSI surprised us hugely by implementing that to Wind and made it quite easy by pressing the special lock key called “TurboDrive” button, which is activated by “Fn+F10″. This will overclock CPU up as much as 20 percent. 

When the TurboDrive is turned on and the system is plugged in, an orange icon flashes in the corner of the screen and the power button changes from blue to orange. Running a CPU Speed Professional test with the TurboDrive turned on, the CPU clocked in at 1.9 GHz.

When the system is running off its battery, the TurboDrive reduces the CPU’s clock speed around 50 percent and dims the screen to extend battery life; the CPU clocked in at 1.1 GHz with this setting on. When we overclocked it to 1.9 GHz, our 3DMark03 test jumped from 606 to 746. And when we tried our same multitasking (video conferencing, listening to music, surfing the Web), we noticed smoother performance. Second Life also paused less, and loading images in the 3D world’s distance took less time.

[quoted from laptopmag.com]

Embedded with the presently quite scarce Windows XP Home, Wind can operate in a very smooth way. Not any factor that Intel had incorporated in such a solution is limiting any good operating experience. Users can safely put trust upon such a mini laptop to be the lightweight substitution of their big and puffy and yet much mighty counterparts whenever they are not in immediate need of high performance. 

All in all, MSI Wind U100 is one great mini notebook and its design is very elegant. If it can ever sell at a lower price, Wind is definitely to bring on powerful wind that will sweep the ultra mobile notebook market.

[credit belongs to Windwithme]