As we've pointed out earlier, this model of the mPC 945 comes equipped with a wireless network connection. While it doesn't support the latest high speed standard, 802.11b/g is covered by the mini PCI card.

Up until recently with the Core 2 Duo (which isn't supported by the mPC 945 anyhow), 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.

The heatsink features a copper base and aluminum fins that run the length of the cooler. 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. As shown in the above right image, the heatpipes are almost flush with the PCIE slot. 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

Not much to say about the BIOS other than it is functional. From an enthusiast point of view, to put it mildly, the BIOS leaves a lot to be desired if you're planning on overclocking. 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 CPU which is an engineering sample. There are no options for the FSB, so whatever speed your CPU is, that is what you'll be limited to.

Test Setup

MSI mPC 945: Intel 560 (3.6GHz), 2 x 512MB Corsair TWIN2X PC4300 @ 533MHz, ASUS Radeon X800XT, 160GB Seagate 7200.7, Windows XP SP1.

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 945 will be the MSI mPC 915 and Soltek EQ3501-300P (both 915 based systems). The setups all share the same peripheral components with the exception of the mPC 945 which will be using DDRII based memory. Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for all of the 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 both of the MSI mPCs since those options were not available.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2005 - Due to resource and time constraints, we were unable to redo all the setups with the latest version of Sandra 2007, but this benchmark will still be enough to tell us something about the mPC 945.

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 PiFast 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 The Second Renaissance Part 1, 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. Bench'emAll was used to collect numbers from Far Cry and UT2004.

SiSoft Sandra 2005 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2005 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2005 Memory

All the results are pretty close. The memory tests favoured the higher frequency mPC 945, but overall the Soltek makes a good showing due to the fact that there are several performance options that benefit it.

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