Benchmarks
The four-bar graph shows the performance of the HP Pavilion dv2 and MSI Wind on mains and battery-powered modes. Remember that in both instances the laptops are set to high-performance.| 7-zip compression of 205MB files | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| HP Pavilion dv2 (mains) | HP Pavilion dv2 (battery) | MSI Wind (mains) | MSI Wind (battery) |
| 243 | 248 | 235 | 241 |
The AMD Athlon Neo MV-40 and Intel Atom N270 are both clocked in at 1.6GHz. AMD's chip has a single-core, single-thread-processing architecture, whereas Intel's Atom is a single core, dual-thread processor, thanks to HyperThreading.
What we see here is that the Atom is very slightly faster at compressing via 7-zip, which takes HT into account. Both laptops take around four minutes, and just a few seconds longer when running in mobile mode.
| Terminator Salvation 480p (mov) playback via VLC | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| HP Pavilion dv2 (mains) | HP Pavilion dv2 (battery) | MSI Wind (mains) | MSI Wind (battery) |
| 20.2 | 22.6 | 22.4 | 26.5 |
Moving on to video, both produce smooth, stutter-free motion when playback the 480p movie trailer. It looks better on the HP, as it ships with a nicer, bigger screen, but both CPUs easily handle the load. Note that this test doesn't take advantage of the HP's discrete card's Avivo feature.
| Terminator Salvation 720p (mov) playback via VLC | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| HP Pavilion dv2 (mains) | HP Pavilion dv2 (battery) | MSI Wind (mains) | MSI Wind (battery) |
| 46.2 | 49.9 | 55.2 | 62.9 |
Add some extra load in the way of a 720p clip, which only displays natively on the HP, and the CPU utilisation goes up. What the graph doesn't show is that the Wind's performance is choppy, stuttering at points. The Neo-powered HP dv2 runs smoothly on the mains and on battery. However, both laptops suffer when rendering YouTube HD clips, often stuttering as the load spikes.
Part of the dv2's software package includes a Blu-ray software decoder. Bustin' out an external ASUS Blu-ray drive and playing back the movie '300', average CPU load hovered around 55 per cent. The important aspect here is that visuals were smooth.
| Laptop - ET:QW - medium quality - 1,024x600 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| HP Pavilion dv2 (mains) | HP Pavilion dv2 (battery) | MSI Wind (mains) | MSI Wind (battery) |
| 28.3 | 21.3 | 0.1 | 0.1 |
The gaming performance is a case of night and day. The Mobility Radeon HD 3410 512MB makes a reasonable fist of gaming, rendering the game correctly. Battery-powered performance drops as the discrete card's frequencies are cut. The on-mains performance drops to 21.1fps at the native 1,280x800. Integrated graphics on the Atom are plain poor - not even being able to play the game at any resolution.
| Battery-life with FLV Player looping HEXUS.tv Flash clip | |
|---|---|
| HP Pavilion dv2 (battery) | MSI Wind (battery) |
| 73 | 131 |
Here's where the dv2 really falls down. The shipping four-cell (55WHr) battery simply isn't large enough to deliver decent mobile usage when playing a full-screen Flash movie. The dv2 falls into hibernation in just over an hour, and its life-span is considerably shorter than a standard battery on the Wind. We'd really want at least two hours on this test, and HP may need to ship a six-cell battery.
