MSI 's Atom N450 powered Wind U135

The MSI Wind U135 is now available in the market. This is the first netbook available in the Philippines powered by the new Intel Atom N450 which promises 15-30% longer batter life. Unfortuantely, MSI, the leader in netbook design a year ago has fallen so far behind, and the new MSI Wind U135 does not do enough.

The keyboard on the MSI Wind U135 finally comes up to the standards of current netbooks, and its 5-6 hour battery life with a 6-cell battery is an improvement over the previous MSI netbooks. But battery life is a big disappointment. The problem is Asus Eee PC 1005HA and Toshiba's NB200 with 6-cell batteries have a good 9 hours of battery life with the older Atom N280, and will have 11-12 hours of battery life with the newer Atom N450 powered models (Asus 1005PE). The Atom N450 power MSI Wind U135, will only provide half the battery life of the class leaders.

Intel Atom N450

Intel is coming out with a new line-up of Atom processors, and the very successful "Diamondville" Atom N270 and N280, together with the 945GSE chipset will end their life in 2009. The first of the new series of "Pineview" processors to his the market will be the Intel Atom N450 which will be pair with the NM10 chipset. Clocked at 1.66GHz with a 667MHz front side bus and 512kb of L2 cache, it has similar specifications to the Atom N280.

The differences are that the new Atom N450 moves the graphics and memory controller from the motherboard into the CPU. The NM10 chipset with the new GMA 3150 has a graphics processor 67MHz faster than the older Intel 950 Graphics found on the 945GSE chipset.Reviews of early Atom N450 units, like Laptopmags review of the new N450 powered ASUS Eee PC 1005PE-P, shows that the new processor does not perform appreciably better than the older N280 in terms of speed.

But what there is to get excited about is battery life, the new package reportedly consumes 20% less juice than the Atom N280/945GSE combo, and thus the new netbooks will be having 15-30% longer battery life.