Product Listing

MSI PR200 Notebook (Intel Santa Rosa)

By Vincent Chang - 25 Jun 2007

Performance Benchmarks

Performance Benchmarks

Since we are still transitioning from Windows XP to Windows Vista for our notebooks, we only have a handful of benchmark comparisons. Throw in the new Santa Rosa platform and it becomes harder to find suitable comparisons without calling in multiple notebooks from vendors in a full-fledged shootout. Hence, we had to rely on the initial engineering sample for Intel for the comparisons below. We were also restricted to PCMark05 and 3DMark06 since these were the two prominent benchmarks that worked perfectly in Windows Vista. Below are the brief and relevant specifications for the two notebooks compared:

Notebook Comparison Table
Specifications/Notebook MSI PR200 Intel Santa Rosa Prototype
Processor Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7300 (2.0GHz, 4MB L2 cache) Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7700 (2.4GHz, 4MB L2 cache)
Chipset Intel GM965 Intel GM965
FSB 800MHz 800MHz
Memory 2 x 1GB DDR2-667 2 x 512MB DDR2-667
Video Intel GMA X3100 Intel GMA X3100

Results - PCMark05

With its slower processor, it was only expected that the MSI PR200 lagged behind the Intel engineering notebook sample in the CPU score. The difference of 20% in the scores did seem acceptable given the similar disparity in clock speeds. While the MSI PR200 did marginally better in the hard drive subcategory (the Intel sample was using a solid state hybrid drive), its memory performance was about 12% lower than the Intel machine, leading to an overall result where the MSI lagged behind by 11%.

Results - 3DMark06

Surprisingly, despite the similar onboard graphics chipset found on both notebooks, the MSI PR200 managed to garner a significant lead of around 17%. Given that we tested the Intel Santa Rosa sample some time back, there are probably some improvements in drivers that has led to the better performance on the MSI PR200. These figures are however still woefully slow as far as real gaming is concerned on the newest games, but that's a given with the class of graphics engine found on notebooks of this range and target audience the notebook was designed to please.

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