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MSI's Atom-based Wind desktop PC tested

by on20 May 2008

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Clocked at 1.33GHz

Japanese Website Impress has scored an exclusive preview of MSI's upcoming Atom-powered Wind desktop PC and it holds quite a few surprises. First of all, it uses a rather unexpected Atom processor, as it's powered by an Atom Z520 at 1.33GHz.

The Z520 appears to be one of the processor models Intel has earmarked for the embedded PC market, although it only lists a faster 1.6GHz and a slower 1.1GHz version on its website. Nonetheless, it wasn't the Atom processor we expected to see in this system, as we thought it would use the standard Atom 230 low-cost CPU.

The Wind desktop system also features a rather unusual motherboard design and it's very much proprietary. Interestingly, the entire motherboard appears to be powered by a single Molex connector. The system is powered by an external power brick and internally it has two Molex connector and two SATA power connectors.

The motherboard has a single SO-DIMM slot for memory and the tested machine had 1GB of DDR2 667MHz memory installed. It also has the internal Compact Flash slot that we mentioned earlier and you can also see the mini-PCIe expansion slot. Furthermore, there are two SATA ports and a couple of internal connectors that we can't indentify. The CPU and chipset are passivly cooled and what appears to be a 60 or 80mm fan cools the entire system.

Around the back are the ports we reported about in the earlier story and the same goes around the front. However, it appears that MSI changed its mind about the slim-line slot-loaded optical drive and in its place is a standard 5.25-inch drive. We can't say that we think too highly about the design aesthetics, but if it'll be cheap enough, we're sure it'll sell.

Looking at the benchmark figures, which can be somewhat hard to figure out as a lot of the details are in Japanese, we can conclude one thing, the Atom Z520 is anything but a fast processor. The 900MHz Celeron processor found in the Eee PC 900 beats it hands down if you look at the CPU score for PCMark05 by quite a margin. There are too many benchmarks for us to quote all the numbers here, but at least this Atom processor is no speed demon.

You can find several pictures and benchmarks here, although there's very little in terms of relevant comparisons.
Last modified on 20 May 2008
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