Intel Atom-powered MSI Wind performance tested. Nothing to get excited about?

We’re still waiting to get our hands on the MSI Wind ultra-portable (“this month”, according to MSI), but Japanese tech site Impress has scored a review with its diminutive desktop sibling – also called the Wind.

If you’re wondering why this is interesting, it’s because that like the MSI Wind laptop, the dinky Wind desktop also uses an Intel Atom processor and Impress has run some benchmarks to assess its performance. The bad news is that the Google translation of the site doesn’t shed much light on Impress’ thoughts, but the good news is that there is a less linguistically challenging benchmarks results table.

Impress compared the Intel Atom 1.33GHz to the Celeron M353 in the Asus Eee PC 900 and Eee PC 701 (running at 900Mhz and 630Mhz, respectively) and the Core 2 Duo U7600 (1.2Ghz) in the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ90S.

Judging by the PCMark 05 results (where higher is better), the Atom didn’t do too well – the chip lags well behind the ultra-lower voltage Core 2 Duo chip in the Sony VAIO and isn’t significantly faster than the Celeron M at both 630Mhz and 900Mhz.

Processor benchmarks aren’t the best measure for a PC’s performance, of course, and the Intel Centrino Atom platform should also bring some much-needed power consumption improvements to laptops.

If Google translated Impress’s findings correctly though, the MSI Wind desktop PC drew around 35W under load, compared to 15W for the Asus Eee PC. Intel claims the Atom will draw up to 2.5W, so it looks like we’ll have to wait and see how Intel Atom-powered laptops fare when it comes to battery life.

[ Impress]