Performance Comparison

The MSI Wind U100 was bought last year and has received a few upgrades, 2Gb memory and a entry level SSD; The SSD helps boot up times A LOT, but overall CPU/GPU benchmarks are still pretty much limited by their speed and the SSD doesn’t help there.

The MSI Wind was running Windows 7 RTM also, so somewhat an apples vs apples comparison here; except for the HDD benchmark of course.



The Atom 1.6Ghz scores better in memory sensitive tasks, but raw CPU benchmarks give the nod to the 1.2Ghz Athlon; GPU score is noticeably higher on the Radeon card. HDD benchmark, as mentioned, is dominated by the SSD.



Time to really drive the point home, the Radeon Xpress X1270 does quite ok in 3D03, 3D05 is more of a slide show; overall though the Radeon graphics are 127% faster than the Intel GMA 950



SuperPi is a single thread application, here the Athlon CPU is noticeably faster; the WPrime application is multithreaded, Atom has HT support, which gives it a small lead here.



We tested a few games on both netbooks, Q3A was not really very fun on the MSI Wind, and despite the average of 41.3fps the min.FPS dips were well below that, UT2003 was unplayable. On the DOT M/A the experience was a lot better with Q3A as you can see with the 80fps; UT2003 was more challenging, LowDetail was fun, max detail… a bit too taxing.



screen brightness was set to 50%

Battery life test proved interesting; completely idle the DOT M/A held out a little bit more than 3 hours. Under 100% load it was about 2 hours and half, not too bad for a 6-cell battery, but we’ve seen better. AMD Athlon is not a match for the efficiency of the Atom CPU, and the larger 11.6” LED screen certainly does not help. The MSI Wind with its original 3-cell battery had to be charged daily, with a much larger and lumpier 9-cell battery it runs more than 6 hours idle, and more than 5 hours under full load.



We measured 1.5kg on our scale for the DOT M/A, that’s 150 gram more than specifications led us to believe…