Review Notebook MSI Wind U250: The Ultra-mobile Performer

Performance

These scores are actually pretty good for an ultra portable device. At the very least, they are higher compared to the numbers produced by other Wind computers from MSI. You should have no problem running most productivity applications on this small notebook. Don’t expect anything extraordinary though, it’s obviously not designed to handle heavier, more resource hungry programs. ATI Stream support will help accelerate certain tasks, especially those related with multi media contents.

Battery Life

The 6-cell battery stores enough power to sustain the Wind U250 or 229 minutes or 3 hours and 49 minutes, according to our MobileMark 2007 benchmark. That’s not very long for an ultra portable device. Best to keep the adaptor handy at all times.

Video Transcoding

We carried out this particular test under two different conditions: with the ATI Stream turned on and off. In 1080p video transcoding scenario, Wind U250’s Radeon chip finished the process faster than the CPU. However, in 720p conversion, things turned around and the Athlon CPU took the lead. While this shows that the graphics subsystem is somewhat underpowered, it still gives this notebook some significant advantages over most ordinary ultra portable device that doesn’t even have parallel processing support.

Performance: Radeon HD4225M Graphics

Based on the results from our 3D Mark 2006 and 3D Mark Vantage tests, the Radeon HD4225M Graphics clearly doesn’t have what it takes to run 3D games with acceptable frame rates. Resident Evil 5 and Left 4 Dead were impossible to play, so we tried to run a “lighter” online game: Point Blank. At least this game is still playable.