Product Listing

MSI PR200 Notebook (Intel Santa Rosa)

By Vincent Chang - 25 Jun 2007

Santa Rosa, of Course

Santa Rosa, of Course

As most of you should know by now, Intel has updated its Centrino technology offering with the new Santa Rosa platform, with improvements in quite a few key areas that we have documented previously. MSI's PR200 is not quite the complete implementation - there is no Turbo Memory feature (codenamed Robson), which would have boosted performance through the use of flash memory similar to how Windows Vista's ReadyBoost works. This is not surprising and seems to be the popular option from vendors now, as the performance gains of Turbo Memory are debatable at the moment and the drivers for it are still not quite baked. We have already seen at least one vendor, HP publicly stating that it will not include Turbo Memory in its Santa Rosa notebooks, as there is no tangible benefit to consumers.

Pulled down by its onboard graphics, the MSI PR200 only scores a mediocre 3.5 on the Windows Experience Index. This was however marginally higher than the 3.4 score of the Santa Rosa prototype we received from Intel. The weakness on that machine was similarly the integrated X3100 graphics accelerator.

In terms of hardware, the MSI PR200 is not the fastest Santa Rosa notebook by any measure, but it's equipped with a decently fast 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo (T7300) processor from Intel and 2GB of DDR2-667 memory. There are only two SODIMM slots on this notebook and both are filled in our unit. Since it uses the GM965 chipset, onboard graphics is courtesy of an Intel GMA X3100 processor, which is an improvement over its predecessor, especially for high definition video playback due to its Intel Clear Video technology that should reduce CPU overheads for MPEG-2 and WMV9 (VC-1) media. Another plus point is that the graphics engine supports DirectX 10 standards, but not till the appropriate drivers are ready early in 2008! In any case, don't hold your breath since integrated graphics is always a fair bit slower than a discrete engine. For the MSI PR200, the capabilities of the GMA X3100 graphics engine are a bonus when taking into account the notebook's business usage point of view, since they would probably be used sparingly.

A SuperMulti DVD burner (Optiarc AD-7530A) with writing speeds of up to 8x for DVD-/+R media, 4x for Double layer DVD media and 24x for CD media is found in the PR200. Lastly, a 160GB SATA notebook hard drive from Western Digital completes the system, though its average 5400RPM rating will not be winning any benchmarks soon. Microsoft's Windows Vista Home Premium is the operating system used in our review unit, though MSI's website states that the Business version will be installed for the retail units by default.

Battery Life and Portability Ratio

With MobileMark still incompatible with Windows Vista, we had to rely on a DVD playback test for a gauge of the battery life on this notebook instead of our usual way of running MobileMark's assessment. Before we started, we disabled the wireless LAN and checked that the power profile was set to Balanced in Windows Vista. In the subsequent test, the MSI PR200 managed to last 2 hours and 50 minutes, almost running through our DVD twice over. In contrast, an Intel Santa Rosa engineering sample with a more powerful 7200mAH battery managed three and a half hours. The MSI PR200 review unit came with an extended 8-cell Li-On battery rated at 4400mAH by default and this would be the default shipping configuration for certain countries. This is the reason why the notebook's battery pack seemed much larger than its frame can hold from our earlier photos.

Using our DVD playback battery life result, we added in the factors of weight and volume to produce our own index of how portable this notebook is compared to others. Hence, the graph below, which showed that the MSI PR200 did reasonably well against other notebooks tested previously in terms of its battery life and portability. However this was using an extended 8-cell battery that may give the MSI notebook an unfair edge. Additionally, the other notebooks were running MobileMark while the MSI PR200 was looping a DVD though we felt that the overall result would not deviate significantly.

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