NbC: MSI Wind U115 Hybrid Review
July 27, 2009 at 9:23 am
Performance
The MSI Wind U115 Hybrid is powered by the energy-efficient 1.6GHz Z530 Atom processor. This is the same clock speed found in the popular N270 Atom CPU, although during our use the netbook felt a little more sluggish than the Samsung N120, which uses a N270 Atom. We didn’t find this so much during typical web browsing or using office applications, but more so when watching internet video content or HD video.
We have come across some reports that show that the Z530 CPU is slower, clock-for-clock, than the N270 CPU and this was what we found in our benchmark tests below too. If would have made a difference if MSI had included the Turbo overclocking option that is found in the Wind U100. Obviously, this would have had a direct impact on heat (and maybe noise levels) but at least the option would be there for consumers to choose.
However, for most day-today tasks, the Wind U115 really shone. We had no problems with multi-tasking i.e. browsing whilst using office apps and streaming music.
Video
As discussed earlier, the Z530 CPU comes with the US15W ‘Poulsbo’ chipset. This is one of the latest chipsets and comes with GMA500 graphics that enables hardware video acceleration of H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4, VC1, and WMV9 files. Whilst all of this sounds great in theory, we found that the video performance is worse than N270/N280 Atom-based models we’ve tested in the past.
Normal YouTube videos played without any problems, although when playing back in full-screen we did notice more dropped frames than the Samsung N120. Playing back even normal YouTube video would lead to CPU utilisation of between 90 and 100 percent. As you can imagine, HD YouTube was a complete no-go.
Standard-definition AVI files played from the hard-drive smoothly with no frame rate drops. CPU usage was typically around the 25 percent mark. However, our attempts to playback HD 720p content was not so successful. Certain HD trailers that played back without any problems on other N270 Atom models stuttered with the U115.
Given the supposedly better technology inside the U115 we were very confused about the problems we were having. We downloaded the latest GMA500 drivers (V6.14.11.1009), although that made no difference. We also downloaded CoreAVC, which did make a bit of a difference, but the result was still worse than other netbooks we’ve used.
The main issue surrounds the very poor driver support for the GMA500 graphics chipset. On paper, it has the potential to blow Intel’s 945GSE/GMA950 chipset out of the water, but until we see better support, the results are noticeably worse than you’ll find on a N270 or N280-Atom-based netbook.
The other issue is that many of the driver updates that do exist for the GMA500, occur under Windows Vista and Windows 7 operating systems. However as the U115 and most other netbooks ship with Windows XP, this still makes it an issue. If you can bide the time until Windows 7 is released or until Intel improve their driver support than I’m sure video performance should be better than what we have seen with the current 945GSE/GMA950 chipset, but patience is definitely a factor here.
Benchmarks
As usual, we ran a number of different benchmarks to support what we have said above. The results compare what we found against the Asus Eee PC 1000HE and Samsung N120. The 1000HE was benched in the High Performance Mode and not the overclocked Super Performance Mode. The Samsung N120 was benched on the Auto CPU speed setting. All benchmark tests were undertaken in battery mode.
For the hard-drive tests we ran the tests twice, once to detail the performance of the HDD and once for the SDD.
Boot time
The MSI Wind U115 had quick boot times, taking just 29 seconds to reach the Start menu. Shutting down took longer at 45 seconds. Both of these were average times taken across three attempts.
GeekBench
Geekbench provides a number of different benchmarks to accurately measure processor and memory performance. The MSI Wind u115 produced a score of 851, lagging both the Samsung N120 (877) and Asus 1000HE (913).
3DMark03
We didn’t understand this result. Running 3DMark03 on the U115 produced a score of 495 3DMarks. This was significantly lower than that achieved by the Samsung N120 (734) and Eee PC 1000HE (780). We ran the tests a number of times but always scored the same.
3DMark06
The above result was even more confusing considering how close the 3DMark06 scores were. The U115 scored the same as the Samsung N120 (87 3DMarks), against the 93 scored by the Eee PC 1000HE.
Super Pi
Using Super Pi to calculate Pi to 1 million digits took the U115 95 seconds. This was two seconds slower than the Samsung N120 (93 seconds) and seven seconds slower than the Eee PC 1000HE (88 seconds).
For those that may be interested, we ran Super Pi across all digits and we have included the results below.
wPrime
Strangely, the U115 took the honours in this test. It took 122.03 seconds to complete the 32M test, marginally beating the Samsung N120 (124.015 seconds).
This was also the case on the 1024M test with the U115 completing the test in 3,921 seconds, compared to 3,968 seconds for the Samsung N120 and 5,776 seconds for the Eee PC 1000HE.
7-Zip
7-Zip is a free compression tool and genuine alternative to WinRAR. Decompressing a large file is one of those places where a slower CPU can leave you waiting for a few seconds, so we thought it would be a fitting application to test. Using the internal benchmark this measures compression and decompression performance in MIPS and provides an average result.
It is multi-threaded so takes advantage of the latest multi-core enabled CPUs. The Z530 Atom CPU supports Hyper-Threading Technology, allowing the operating system to run two threads on one core. We therefore ran the benchmark using two CPU threads. We left the benchmark to accumulate at least 10 runs using a 32MB Dictionary size in order to get a solid, average result. The Wind U115 scored 1258 MIPS, coming behind the Samsung N120 which scored 1295.
Peacekeeper
FutureMark’s Peacekeeper is a benchmark that uses JavaScript to measure browser performance during web rendering. Given that one of the main tasks on netbooks is surfing the net, we thought it we would be an apt benchmark to use. However, as you would expect, the performance can differ greatly depending on which browser is used.
For this test, we ran it across Internet Explorer 8 (8.0.6001.18702), Firefox (3.0.10) and Opera (9.64). As can be seen below, the U115 scored significantly better than the Samsung N120. I’m at a loss to explain the performance increase, especially as the same browser versions were run on the N120 test too.
PowerBench Powerflasher
Powerbench Powerflasher measures the performance of applications designed in Adobe Flash 10. As with the Peacekeeper benchmark, we tested it across three different browsers as stated above. This time around the performance was almost identical with the Samsung N120, which makes the above scores even more puzzling.
CrystalMark
CrystalMark is a benchmarking utility for testing your computer performance by running various benchmark tests. CrystalMark lets you test your CPU, memory, HDD and Video (GDI, Direct Draw, OpenGL). The overall score of 24,402 was lower than the Samsung N120 (28,369) and 1000HE (30,146).
Running the same test yielded a lower score of 23,526 and a lower HDD score.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark evaluates the performance of your hard drives based on two tests – a sequential read/write test and a random read/write test. You can select the drive to test, the number of test and the size of the data to test which can be 50MB, 100MB, 500MB and 1000MB.
The results displayed below have been conducted using 5 rounds of the 100MB test. We conducted two tests, one of the HDD and one for the SDD. The read/write speeds for the HDD (below) were than seen in the Samsung N120 and 1000HE.
The results for the SDD are a bit strange, after all, look at how low those write speeds are. I’m sure there much be a mistake somewhere, but this same trend occurred during several tests. Looking at this result and the Crystalmark result though does highlight that the 7GB PATA SDD is a slow performer.
HD Tune
HD Tune is a hard disk utility that can measure the raw performance of your drive, including transfer rate, burst rate and access time. The average transfer rate of the HDD was 49.9MB/sec whilst the access time was 16.8ms. This was marginally faster than the Samsung N120.
The average transfer rate of the SDD was higher at 55.4MB/sec and with an access time of just 0.3ms.
August 22nd, 2009 3:58 PM
I will appreciate to know where i can shop this amazing netbook.
I am writing from Nigeria and the good battery life will make huge business sense here.
Best regards.
Chidi