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Review: MSI's CR610 AMD Tigris notebook benchmarked.

by Tarinder Sandhu on 29 October 2009, 10:51

Tags: CR610 Tigris, AMD (NYSE:AMD), MSI

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qaung

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Introduction

Ultra-portable a little lacking?

Looking back at 2009, AMD's attempted to make notebooks rather sexy with the release of the ultra-portable Yukon and Congo platforms.

Based on the Yukon platform, HP's gorgeous-looking Pavilion dv2 set our pulses racing for the wrong reasons. Great aesthetics and a competitive street price were compromised by incredibly poor battery life and substandard thermal control. The dv2 still exists today, complete with a better specification, and it remains one of a handful of Yukon-powered models on the market.

AMD's Congo platform, the natural successor to Yukon, has recently been exemplified by the Acer Ferrari, sporting a dual-core Athlon X2 L310 chip and a 7-series chipset. It should be decent, especially if stock is made available soon, and will fight it out with other 11.6in ultra-portable notebooks featuring Intel's CULV platform.

Mainstream

Focusing on the mainstream segment, where AMD really needs to do well, and branded under the VISION banner, the company's released the Tigris platform; an update on the Puma backbone powering the majority of AMD mid-sized notebooks for the last year.

Tigris will use a range of 'Caspian' Turion, Athlon, and Sempron processors that sit on an RS880M chipset and hook up to DDR2 RAM. The IGP contains the Mobility Radeon HD 4200-series integrated graphics. The GPU portion is a minor improvement over incumbent Mobility Radeon HD 3200, now s supporting for DX10.1 and an updated video-processing unit, UVD 2.0. Basic performance will be similar to the MHD 3200, though, as both IGPs have 40 stream processors clocked in at 500MHz.

Tigris, then, should benchmark at around the same level as Puma, assuming same-speed processors are used. What does a Tigris-based notebook look like? We're glad you asked.