NbC: MSI Wind U135 Review

« 1. Introduction2. Build & Design3. Upgradeability, Dimensions & Weight 4. Ports, Features & Connectivity5. Keyboard & Touchpad6. Display, Speakers, Heat & Noise 7. Performance & Benchmarks8. Battery Life9. Conclusion10. View All »

Performance

The MSI Wind U135 is powered by the 1.66GHz N450 Atom Pineview processor found in most new netbooks. This comes with the Intel GMA 3150 graphics chip. The Atom N450 CPU has 512KB of L2 cache and a FSB (memory) speed of 667MHz. This energy efficient processor is rated at 5.5 watts TDP.

It supports SpeedStep power management, XD bit virus protection and Hyper-Threading technology. It is also a 64-bit processor that means you can install a wide variety of operating systems including Windows 7 x64.

Video

Despite this being a new generation of processor that comes with a new graphics part (GMA 3150), it’s disappointing to see little increase in power over the old GMA950 chip. Video performance was similar to most other N270/N280 Atom netbooks. We could watch standard definition video content without any issues although struggled with some 720p HD video. With no type of hardware decoding (unlike ION or Intel’s GMA 500) it means that you may find success with some HD videos and not others.

Watching Flash content (YouTube) on the U135 was possible, but only standard definition videos. CPU usage with these videos was around 80 to 90 percent so it’s not hard to guess that HD videos was a no-go. If it’s multimedia performance you are after, you are best to go for an ION-powered netbook.

Benchmarks

As usual, we ran a number of different benchmarks to see exactly how the Wind U135 fares against its peers. All benchmark tests were undertaken in battery mode.

Boot time

The MSI Wind U135 took 38.3 seconds to boot to the Windows 7 Starter screen. Shutting down was quicker at 25.5 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 U135 was the fastest of the 10-inch netbooks tested with a score of 921.

3DMark03

Graphics performance came near the bottom compared to other Atom netbooks, scoring a 3DMark03 of 699. This compares to the Asus Eee PC 1000HE with 780 and the Toshiba NB200 at 758.

3DMark06

Despite coming near last in the 3DMark03 test, there was a complete turnaround within the
3DMark06 benchmark. At 156 marks the Wind U135 obliterated the field with the second-placed Asus Eee PC 1005HA having a score of 118.

Super Pi

Using Super Pi to calculate Pi to 1 million digits took the U135 90 seconds, in line with the Toshiba NB200 (90 seconds), 1005HA (92 seconds) and Samsung N120 (93 seconds).

For those that may be interested, we ran Super Pi across all digits and we have included the results below.

wPrime

The MSI Wind U135 took 68 seconds to complete the 32M test, once again leaving it with a significant lead over its peers. It was similarly the fastest of all netbooks in the 1024M test, completing it in 2,150 seconds. The second fastest was the Toshiba NB200 completing it in 3,866 seconds.

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 N450 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 U135 scored 1,270 MIPS, coming near the bottom of the pile.

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 U135 scored the best results seen in a 10-inch netbook so far.

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 25,241 was lower than most other netbooks tested including the Toshiba NB200 (27,553), the Asus Eee PC 1005HA (28,179), the Samsung N120 (28,369) and 1000HE (30,146).

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.

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 54.4MB/sec whilst the access time was 18.5ms.

« 1. Introduction2. Build & Design3. Upgradeability, Dimensions & Weight 4. Ports, Features & Connectivity5. Keyboard & Touchpad6. Display, Speakers, Heat & Noise 7. Performance & Benchmarks8. Battery Life9. Conclusion10. View All »