MSI X610: Supersizing the Netbook?

X610 Application Performance

You can read about our testing setup and the other laptops used in our previous GIGABYTE M1022 review. As an amalgamation of netbook and notebook designs, the MSI X610 straddles the fence between those two markets. Considering the suggested price of €500, the X610 is going to compete more against entry-level notebooks (i.e. Gateway's NV52/NV58 models) than it will against netbooks, although certainly there are users that will be interested in a multimedia netbook that doesn't weigh a lot and the X610 fits that niche nicely.

We will start our performance comparison with general application testing, including PCMark, CINEBENCH, and video encoding tests. Since MSI ships the X610 with Windows Vista (32-bit), we are also able to run PCMark Vantage this time around. As we have discussed elsewhere, PCMark05 has some odd results under XP in some of the tests that skew the overall score. We will include detailed PCMark05/PCMark Vantage results where applicable so you can see the individual test scores.

The general application performance results establish a trend that we will see repeated in many areas. Compared to netbooks, the MSI X610 is faster than any current Intel Atom offering. That's not likely to change until Pineview/Pine Trail at the very earliest, and even that isn't a guarantee that Intel Atom will surpass a reasonably fast single-core Athlon (or Core 2) processor. On the other hand, the Gateway NV52 with its QL-64 processor easily beats the X610, and the NV58 is anywhere from 2-3.5X as fast. You might say that's not a fair comparison, but keep in mind that the Gateway NV58 is a $600 laptop, the NV52 is a $500 laptop, and X610 is currently targeting a €500 price tag. It weighs less, but it's also substantially slower.

Turning to the detailed PCMark results, outside of a few tests that clearly favor Windows Vista, the general pattern remains the same. The two Gateway laptops are usually first and second place in the MSI is third, followed by the various netbooks. There are individual cases where that doesn't hold true, but most of the time that's related to hard drive performance. Only two tests have the MSI X610 clearly in the lead, and it should come as no surprise that both tests involve graphics. In PCMark05, the 3D Pixel Shaders and 2D 64 Line Redraw tests have the X610 leading by 200% and 50%, respectively. It's also interesting to note that PCMark Vantage Gaming suite still has the X610 trailing the Gateway laptops by a significant margin.

All of the above tests focus primarily on CPU performance, and they take advantage of multi-core processors. That definitely puts the Neo MV-40 at a disadvantage, and we will see if the discrete graphics can turn the tables in other benchmarks. It looks as though the HD 4330 GPU in the X610 potentially offers three times the performance of the HD 3200 in the NV52. However, games also require CPU performance at times, so depending on the game engine we may or may not see the HD 4330 flex its muscles.