MSI Wind U230-040 Review – MSI’s Atom Smasher

For battery life testing, we disable all power saving features such as screen dimming and hard drive shut-off, to see what an end user can expect from the product if they were to run the notebook non-stop until the battery is depleted. Therefore, these results are like a worst case scenario and in real life you would expect a bit longer battery life due to power saving features and timed screen shut-off and sleeping.

*PCPer Web productivity consists mainly of web browsing, and HD Flash video playback.
PCMark loop uses the photo editing, web browsing, and office productivity benchmark.
H264 loop plays back HD H264 encoded media files until battery dies.

The battery life on the MSI U230 is quite good thanks to a high capacity 6-cell battery rated at 5200 mAh.

Digging a little deeper and comparing power consumption, we can see that the MSI U230 is actually the least efficient compared to the other notebooks. Some of this difference can be explained by the different CPUs in the U230 and the Ferrari One 200. Although not the topic of this review, we can see that the Asus Eee 1201N with the NVIDIA ION assert its superior efficiency when it comes to .h264 video playback.