MSI Wind: Overclocking and GMAbooster benchmarks

[Zap]

MSI Wind completely stock with 1GB RAM, latest 1.0B BIOS.
Apps running in background: Everything that comes pre-installed (SCM, camera, etc.), Daemon Tools 3.47, CPU-Z 1.51, GMAbooster

WoW in-game settings
1024x600 24-bit
effects all set to LOW and all options unchecked, all sound effects unchecked
Outside the gates of Ironforge looking back at it (took a screenshot in case anyone absolutely has to be able to reproduce it).

#1
CPU 1.6GHz GPU 166MHz
21.8 FPS

#2
CPU 2.0GHz GPU 166MHz
26.6 FPS

#3
CPU 1.6GHz GPU 400MHz
21.6 FPS

#4
CPU 2.0GHz GPU 400MHz
27.0 FPS

Notes: FPS was just kind of average because it kept fluctuating over a small 2-3 FPS range. There were times indoors with a lot of people where it would dip under 10 FPS regardless of CPU/GPU settings. 2.0GHz is really 1984MHz-ish. Having the CPU boosted did help WoW feel more playable.

Since the GPU was unable to be immediately set back to 166MHz (chipset limitations?) I shut down the computer to make sure it was a fresh boot for my Quake 3 Demo testing.

Quake 3 Demo 1.11 in-game settings
Game Options: ON (marks on walls, ejecting brass, dynamic lights, identify target, high quality sky), everything else OFF, basically a default install
System Setup/Graphics: 800x600, 32-bit color, lighting/lightmap, geometric/high, texture/highest, texture quality/32-bit, texture filter/trilinear
To benchmark, use "timedemo 1" command from console, and run a demo. I used DEMO001 which is included with the game. I used the FPS results of the SECOND time running the demo to avoid loading lag.

#1
CPU 1.6GHz GPU 166MHz
59.4 FPS

#2
CPU 2.0GHz GPU 166MHz
74.0 FPS

#3
CPU 1.6GHz GPU 400MHz
59.5 FPS

#4
CPU 2.0GHz GPU 400MHz
74.1 FPS

Notes: First time I ever played Quake 3 was on an AMD K6-200 (overclocked to 225MHz) with a Matrox Millenium G200 video card. On a default install of Quake 3 (640x480 no less) I was getting a whopping 14 FPS. After tweaking and overclocking my video card and turning everything in Quake 3 down (I called it "Atari mode") I was getting around 49 FPS. Now I can play it on my Wind with everything turned up and at a higher resolution with more FPS! That's progress... maybe.

Just for fun I'm going to run Quake 3 Demo at the settings I remembered using:
Game Options: Everything off except Simple Items and Identify Target.
System Setup/Graphics: 640x480, 16-bit, Vertex lighting, low details/quality/etc., Bilinear.
CPU 2.0GHz GPU 400MHz
Running DEMO002 which generates higher FPS.
I've gotten around 1008 FPS on one of my recent gaming rigs at these settings. MSI Wind?

114.1 FPS

Woot!

Final thoughts:

Fan seemed to spin up more when gaming/overclocked. There are some simple cooling mods (voids warranty though) that can help.

For the two games I tested (WoW, Quake3) GMAbooster did NOT give any noticeable or measurable increase in performance.

For the two games I tested, overclocking the CPU/RAM (linked so one begets the other) DID give a noticeable or measurable increase in performance.

I have played (for a few minutes) COD4 with everything turned down on an NVIDIA ION setup and it was choppy but playable. The ION setup had a dual-core CPU and of course the mGPU. I would not even want to try COD4 on the MSI Wind with a single core and Intel GMA950.

GMAbooster: Not worth it.

Overclocking BIOS: Semi-worth it.

NVIDIA ION? If board makers can overclock the CPU to 2.0-2.5GHz then it may be worth it.

 

[IlllI]

congrats, you've made it to the mega sticky
oh and could you run some synthetic benchmarks?

 

[PingSpike]

Thanks for the info Zap. That's funny that the GMAbooster didn't do anything.

When you run quake in 8x6 can you use a 1:1 pixel mapping or fixed aspect ratio scaling with the netbook or does it stretch it out?

 

[Zap]

You can set the video drivers to fixed aspect ratio, so basically it will have black bars on the sides.

 

[Zap]

*BUMP*

I was asked for some synthetic benchmarks. The GMAbooster site has some screenshots linked here. I looked at them and indeed they show raw graphics performance going up considerably. I kind of expected that out of synthetics. So, it does seem like GMAbooster is doing something, however my belief is still that the single core Atom is too weak to take advantage of that for "real" gaming.