Nick Race11 June 2008, 4:00 PM
Eeegads! It’s the Wind, breathing new life (in the form of very nice specs) into the rampantly popular ultra-cheap, ultra-small notebook space.
Page 2 - Under the hood
Under the hood, is where the Wind gets really interesting. Using Intel’s new Atom low power processor, the Wind has a surprising amount of power at its disposal. Now, the Atom was never designed to be a computing powerhouse, with early benchmarks placing its performance at just above a Tualatin core Pentium 3, but where it excels is its power saving and Hyperthreaded design. As a departure from the Core 2 multiple cored processors we’ve seen lately from Intel, the Atom is a single cored Hyperthreaded chip, similar to the later Pentium 4 processors. With recent software being designed with multiple cores more and more, Hyperthreading fills the gap where a multi-core solution would be too power hungry. It’s a stopgap, but it ads responsiveness to the system that we wouldn’t have expected.
Our Wind came with the N270 model of the Atom with a native speed of 1.6GHz. SpeedStep and E1C usually had it running at around the 800MHz mark to lower power consumption, but jumping to full speed under load was quick and effective. The Atom N270 sports a mere 512KB of L2 cache, which is a little low for our liking, but as a budget solution it performs remarkably well. Don’t expect to see it as a competitor to the Core 2 at any time, though we feel it certainly gives the previous generation for ULV processors, including the A110 a serious run for its money. A TDP of only 2W isn’t anything to sneeze at as well.
Amusingly, the MSI Wind includes built in, one touch, overclocking. With a Fn-F10 keypress, the system overclocks the processor to 1.9GHz. Though this works on mains power only, it’s a cute way to differentiate the product in the market (as well as show off the flexibility of the Atom). As we didn’t have any complaints about the Atom running at its stock 1.6GHz, running it up to 1.9GHz is really the icing on the cake, and we all know extra CPU headroom is always nice to have.
The Atom was paired with 1GB of DDR2 on an Intel 945GME based mainboard. The 945 is definitely getting long in the tooth at this stage, but as a solution for a low cost machine, it’s stable, proven, and obviously inexpensive. The down side is the Wind uses the graphics from the same generation, the GMA950, with the unit’s 3D performance laughably poor, though we certainly aren’t going to compare it to any mobile gaming platforms. GMA950 ticks a number of boxes, such as DirectX9 compatibility , accelerated operating systems, like Vista or Beryl won’t really be achievable on the platform. For 2D content, GMA950 is quite acceptable.
Another major area where the Wind differs from the Eee is the use of a mechanical hard disk drive. It has positive and negative points, primarily being much larger than the solid state drives (80GB as opposed the very popular Eee’s 4GB spec) and using more power. The drive is a Western Digital WD800BEVS-22RST0, clocking in at 74GB after formatting, and is really quite capacious for a machine at this price point. Performance off the disk is quite reasonable, being a 5,400RPM hard disk drive, but it’s not going to break any disk transfer records. It seems that the hard disk drive isn’t an area where MSI have scrimped on the parts for the Wind.
Being a very small unit, there’s no optical drive installed nor one in the box. If you do need to load software off optical media, you’ll need to invest in a USB optical drive. These days a branded external DVD-RW comes in at around $120, so keep that in mind if you can’t work completely off a network of flash memory card.
Speaking of which, the Wind includes a 4-in-1 card reader for moving data on and off the machine, photos from digital cameras, or whatever suits your usage model. Thankfully, with a large amount of on board storage, it’s not necessary to sacrifice the memory card slot to additional storage as many users of the 4GB EeePC have discovered. Other connectors include headphone and mic 3.5mm jacks, an Ethernet port supporting 10/100 speeds, three USB ports (two on the left and one on the right) and a VGA D-Sub 15 for connecting an external monitor. The older graphics support rules out DVI, HDMI or DisplayPort, but it isn’t a surprise.
Further gizmos included in the standard model include a built in webcam at 1.3 megapixels, which is adequate for video calls on Skype or MSN, a built in mic at the top of the LCD panel and stereo speakers. There’s Wi-Fi provided by a Realtek 802.11b/g PCI Minicard, plus Bluetooth, which in a very portable system without the benefit of a PCMCIA slot, can be used to pair to your phone for mobile broadband.