Up until recently, Intel's CPUs have been a tad bit on the warm side of things. Since these heat issues are compounded in small spaces, MSI includes a custom copper based heatpipe heatsink with their mPC.

There is a bit of thermal paste, not a pad, applied on the heatsink and our initial tests have shown it to be on the level of most non-silicone based pastes. Installation is quite simple; just put the heatsink in place and screw it in. The heatpipes will not interfere with any PCIE video card that does not have any rear cooling apparatus. Passively cooled video cards for example will not fit in this system using this cooler. Unless you dismantle the mPC and remove the heatsink retention plate, you will be unable to use another cooler if your card does not fit.

BIOS

No, we did not forget to include pictures here as there is nothing to show that none of you haven't already seen. Well, to put it bluntly, the BIOS leaves a lot to be desired if you're an overclocking enthusiast. Other than some usual options such as boot order and system time, but there are minimal DRAM options and no options for CPUs, even with our unlocked engineering sample.

Test Setup

MSI mPC 915: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200XL, ASUS Radeon X800XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1.

Soltek EQ3501-300P: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWINX PC3200XL, ATI Radeon X800XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1.

Going up against the MSI mPC 915 will be the Soltek EQ3501-300P (another i915 based system). The setups all share the same peripheral components, and onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for both SFFs, but not used during game testing. All benchmarks will be run a total of three times with the average scores being displayed. Any system tweaks and ram timings were configured to the best possible for each setup, though there wasn't much to do for the MSI mPC since those were not available.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Our standard synthetic benchmark suite, updated to version 2005. While it doesn't provide real-world information, it does give us a base for the rest of the tests.

Business Winstone and Multimedia 2004 -A scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Higher numbers are better.

SYSMark 2004 Office and Content Creation - Another scripted benchmark using real-world applications. Like the previous tests, higher numbers are better.

PiFast - A good indicator of CPU/Motherboard performance is version 4.2, by Xavier Gourdon. We used a computation of 10000000 digits of Pi, Chudnovsky method, 1024 K FFT, and no disk memory. Note that lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

TMPGEnc 2.521 - We used an Animatrix file, titled , and a WAV created from VirtualDub. The movie was then converted it into a DVD compliant MPEG-2 file with a bitrate of 5000. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex was used to convert a 414MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, LQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. These results are real-world, and higher scores are better. was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

Both systems perform very closely with one another which isn't too surprising since they both use the same chipsets. CPU performance is a little stronger with the QBic, but the mPC takes it in the memory tests.

NEXT