MSI Wind U160 Review

Rating: 7.7.

The netbook phenomenon has exploded in recent years with almost every major manufacturer entering into this lucrative market. MSI were one of the pioneers with the 2008 Wind U100 selling en masse to a cost conscious audience. I had one of these units for 9 months and I have to say it was a reliable netbook, even if it was slow as molasses.

The Wind U160, their latest netbook was released months ago and has taken the clunky original design and turned it into a svelte unit which exudes class and will appeal to an audience also concerned with appearance.

How so? Well the Wind U160 only measures 19mm at its thickest diameter and is MSI's thinnest ever netbook weighing only 1.2 kg. The asking price is around £330, so clearly the end product is inexpensive, attractive and ultra portable which in theory should open up sales to a massively wide and dynamic market.

MSI sent us both colour schemes of this netbook – with ‘Fancy Gold' for those who want to catch the eye, and ‘Jet Black' offering a more traditional viewpoint.

The MSI Wind U160 is a rather familar internal design by now. It is based around a 1.66ghz Atom N450 processor with onboard GMA 3150 graphics. This is paired up with 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 250GB SATA hard drive and a 10 inch screen offering 1024×600 resolution. Windows 7 Home Basic 32bit is the chosen operating system.

MSI kindly sent us both colour versions of the laptop, and they arrived in plain grey boxes, which are very ‘corporate' in design and rather appealing.

Each box has a handy little carrying case which is ‘soft' but offers adequate protection if the item is being moved around in your possession.

The box also contains a manual, warranty information and a CD with tools and drivers. This machine doesn't have an optical drive installed, but you can connect an external unit via USB.

Above on the left is the ‘Jet Black' Edition and above right is the ‘Fancy Gold' version. We personally prefer the gold version as it really does look rather expensive in the flesh.

The Fancy gold version opened up from a side angle. It is quite beautiful we are sure you will agree and very surprising considering the relatively low asking price around £330.

The machine has down firing speaking incorporated and there are three USB 2.0 ports in total, one beside the VGA output and the other two on the other side, beside a RJ 45 LAN port and a speaker/headphone and microphone jack. There is also a card slot and Wireless N/Bluetooth connectivity.

Both units close up – same specifications however we noticed the gold netbook only had one sticker on the right, not four as on the black version.

The front is a high gloss finish which looks very well, especially under certain lighting conditions. It certainly looks more expensive than the price suggests.

Underneath there is access to a single DIMM slot, which means you can upgrade the 1GB DDR2 module if you feel its not meeting your requirements. 2GB DDR2 modules are very reasonably priced right now so its not an expensive upgrade (around £35 inc vat). The battery is a whopping six cell unit which protrudes from the back by about 2.5 cm.

MSI do offer a slim 3 cell unit but battery life would be significantly lower so we like the fact they have opted for the meatier unit ‘out of the box'. MSI say the 6 Cell unit has a lifespan of 15 hours, but we will investigate this incredible claim later.

MSI haven't cut corners with the keyboard as I found it a pleasure to work with over the last couple of weeks. I have included a picture of a pound coin over the keys above, so people at home can make an educated judgement in regards to the size of the keys.

I found that typing on this keyboard was relatively good, although I do have big hands and find anything but a full sized IBM style board slows me down, but for the majority of people this will be perfectly usable. There are small ‘bumps' designed into the trackpad to keep motion tied into a physical feedback system.

The trackpad is rather small and I found my finger running ‘out of space' quite regularly and I didn't particularly like the feel of the buttons below it. Multi touch is not supported however MSI have opted to use Sentelic's finger sensing technology. When you use the bundled software the trackpad can be configured to support both horizontal and vertical scrolling by keeping your finger pressed on the specific part of the pad. There is also support on pad clicking implemented which is useful. Swiping to scroll is very intuitive and I am used to a similar system on Apple's iPad.

As seen from this image, the U160 is a very slim chassis design and it is attractive from all angles.

The power supply is a small unit which will not prove troublesome to fit into a laptop case – I have pictured it beside a Nokia E71 phone above to give a good indication of the physical dimensions.

When testing a netbook it is important to keep it realistic. These machines are not used for video editing or for gaming with demanding engines, they are general ‘all round' portable units used for surfing, email, chatting and office work. First let us discuss our general findings with the system over the last 2 weeks.

For a unit costing under £350 we find the MSI is a very attractive proposition, after all it has a 10 inch LED backlit screen which we found to be one of the better units in this class. It has plenty of colour clarity, a decent level of contrast and is easy to read in darkness and in moderate daylight. In intense daylight however or with a light behind you, the gloss screen can be somewhat distracting with it's highly reflective surface.

Sadly we also found viewing angles to be less than stellar and colour depth also lowered significantly when viewed from anything less than ‘head on'. It is not poor by any means but compared with the Sony machines at this size it shows some limitations. Obviously this is tied into the modest asking price, but its worth a mention regardless. 1024×600 resolution is also rather difficult to live with if you move from simple browsing and email to even entry level picture editing in Photoshop.

In regards to audio the speaker system is rather feeble but our expectations were not dashed, as we never expect these to sound impressive anyway. Its only when you move into the high end Alienware machines or Apple's 17 inch Macbook pro that the sound even gets remotely appealing.

The keyboard as we discussed in more detail on the last page is very good and only those people with bigger hands or fat fingers will have an issue when trying to maintain an optimum typing rate.

The U160 remains fairly cool at all times, however if you are watching a 720p movie and load the CPU for a long time, the underside can get warm to the touch, it never gets ‘pant scalding' mind you, but warms up just enough that you realise this thing is working hard to keep you entertained. We will look at noise levels on the coming pages.

For those interested, we have included the Windows 7 built in benchmark scores. The hard drive is the highest performing device in the unit. however obviously with onboard graphics and an Atom processor this number is significantly lowered.

There are a fairly large number of applications pre-installed such as the complete ArcSoft Print Creations suite and Norton Internet Security, which is a trial. Personally I would be through this system with a registry editor after deinstalling two thirds of the preinstalled software, but for the average punter some of these applications would be useful.

The Atom processor is no power house, but at least the newest versions have 2 threads which helps when multitasking.

Firstly we will have a look at its potential rendering capabilities with Cinebench R11.5 32bit.

The results are pretty much in line with a single core Atom processor, its certainly not going to be the machine you will want to use for rendering or video editing on a regular basis.

The performance again isn't going to set the world alight and the machine delivers very basic power both graphically and in regards to CPU performance.

This however only paints a small portion of the picture for potential customers, these machines are not sold as powerhouse rendering or gaming machines and its important that we look into other areas of performance to see how the machine holds up under general everyday use.

We found the real world experience to be quite good, and applications such as Microsoft Office opened rapidly, thanks in part to the reasonably quick mechanical hard drive. Email and surfing was pain free and stable and the netbook was very usuable on the move.

With the newer 2 threaded processors we find multitasking is markedly improved over the earlier ATOM experience and these real world findings are much more important to the potential customer base than a rendering result in Cinebench.

We then tested the machine by loading it with a ripped AVATAR Bluray Disc to 720p inside an MKV container. Earlier ATOM processors had issues with MKV HD playback, but we found this machine was capable of holding all the frames in this test. While we could in theory benchmark 1080p content, this does not seem viable –  there is no HDMI output and we doubt media fanatics will be happy using a VGA connector (or converter) to their shiny new 1080p HDTV. On the internal screen however, 720p content looks fine scaled to the native resolution of the LED panel.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. When testing computer components we have built a specialised system inside a Lian Li chassis with no case fans and have used a fanless cooler on the processor. We are using a heatpipe based passive power supply and an Intel SSD to keep noise levels to a minimum. The motherboard is  passively cooled and we use a Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition graphics card which is also passively cooled. Ambient noise in the room is kept as low as possible. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

Why do this? Well this means we can eliminate secondary noise pollution in the test room and concentrate on only the components we are testing. It also brings us slightly closer to industry standards, such as DIN 45635.

To test today we don't need this PC system so we have taken the MSI Wind U160 netbook into our laboratory and have loaded it with 720p HD content. dBa was measured between 30 minutes and 90 minutes of use – the maximum results were recorded. Temperatures were maintained at 30c. The room rates as 21dBa  – the air conditioning unit in the far corner of the room causes this. We use a Digital Sound Level Noise Decibel Meter Style 2.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

When idle, the Wind U160 is basically all but silent, but after 45 minutes of watching HD content, the cooling system generates a considerable amount of noise to make sure the CPU remains within guidelines. It is clearly audible under load, but nothing that should annoy potential customers. CPU temperatures can hit 78c under full load, so it does get relatively hot around the chassis in this area.

To test the battery we mixed up a fairly regular ‘real day' set of conditions. We used Microsoft Office, browsed the net, typed and replied to emails, watched some videos and even encoded a few video files for use online.

We managed to squeeze just over 10 hours out of the machine which is extremely impressive, but short of the 15 hours that MSI claim. Perhaps using MSI's preconfigured ‘ECO mode' might extend the life span further but it was very hard to see the screen with this enabled. We used the ‘balanced power' mode and set the screen brightness to around 50-55 percent.

Power consumption is a measily 14 watts under normal load, which means that this machine is certainly not going to hit your electricity bill hard, even if you use it all day.

The MSI Wind U160 is one of the prettiest netbooks and we particularly liked the ‘Fancy Gold' colour scheme. The unit itself is slim, light and has a formidable battery life to last you throughout a very long working day … if that is your calling.

Performance is obviously rather weak, but this is what we always expect with a low powered Atom processor and as such if you keep within the expected parameters – surfing the net, checking email, and general office duties, it never fails to deliver. The screen size is best suited for this environment also, because if you try to edit photos, the limited real estate rears its ugly head. The noise levels are also a little higher than we would have liked, but only when you push it with HD content.

When we compare it against the last generation U135, it is a much prettier looking machine with slightly improved components and we feel it is a worthy upgrade due to the massively enhanced appearance and design ethos.

The biggest competition we feel actually comes from MSI's own range, the U200 in particular, which is retailing for only £50 more at time of press. This has a faster processor, bigger screen and double the memory while incorporating a faster hard drive for overall system response gains.

KitGuru says: We can recommend the Wind U160, it is very well built, has a battery life which exceeds 10 hours and most importantly it won't break your back carrying it around. If you want something that looks a little nicer than the netbooks normally associated in this price bracket then you would be well advised to shortlist the U160.

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