MSI Megabook S271 with Turion X2

General Performance:

We didn't have any direct competition for the MSI Megabook S271 in the lab, so we opted to compare its performance against a reference desktop system. We have used our Athlon 64 X2 3800+ configuration from our recent Intel Core 2 Duo processor review. The system is configured with 2GB of memory and a BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC. The numbers are merely there for reference purposes, to give you an idea of how well the S271 performs against one of AMD's slower dual core desktop CPUs.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0:
For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.


Xvid Encoding:
We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.


MP3 Encoding:
We used LAME MT for our audio encoding test - it's the multithreaded version of the popular LAME MP3 encoder. We ran tests with both Intel's and Microsoft's compilers - naturally, the Intel compiler resulted in some performance increases on Intel's processors. We converted all 18 tracks from Moby's popular Play album to a 192kbps variable bit-rate MP3.


MP3 to WAV Decoding:
For our decoding test, we converted the MP3 tracks created in the previous test back to .WAV format, saving the output to a different folder.


File Compression & Encryption:
Our file compression and decompression tests were split into two halves to cover a broad spectrum of performance. The first test we ran was to compress and encrypt the MPEG-2 source file from our video encoding test with the highest quality compression ratio. Secondly, we compressed and encrypted the folder of 400 photographs used in our Photoshop Elements test with the same compression settings.


File Decompression & Decryption:
The two RAR archives created during the compression and encyption tests were then decompressed and decrypted.