As we've pointed out earlier, this model of the mPC C51PV comes equipped with a wireless network connection. While it doesn't support the latest high speed "N" standard, 802.11b/g is covered by the mini PCI card.

AMD CPUs historically have not been as warm as Intel's Prescotts, but MSI includes a custom copper based heatpipe heatsink regardless 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

No, we did not forget to take pictures. There is 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. There are no options for the FSB, so whatever speed your CPU is, that is what you'll be limited to. We kind of understood this for the Intel based mPC systems, but since the AM2 runs a lot cooler, we were hoping for some more options for tweakers.

Test Setup

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519)
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
Memory: 1792MB RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
Driver Version: 6.14.0010.9147

Comparison System: MSI mPC 945: Intel Pentium D 830 (3 GHz)

Going up against the MSI mPC C51PV will be the MSI mPC 945 based system. The setups all share the same peripheral components with the exception of the mPC 945 which will be using an Intel Pentium D 830 based processor. Onboard audio was enabled in the BIOS for both 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 either of the MSI mPCs since those options were not available.

Test Software is as follows:

SiSoft Sandra 2007 - Our standard synthetic suite gets an upgrade. We like to use Sandra (System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) to collect some numbers as a base. The numbers collected are consistent and are easily comparable between systems during tests.

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.

CDex Audio Conversion Wav to MP3 - CDex v170b2 was used to convert a 440.5MB Wav file to a 320kbs MP3. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress v4.2.1.188 - 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.

DVD Shrink - We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

Photoshop CS2 Driver Heaven Test - Photoshop is perhaps the defacto standard when it comes to photo editing tools. Given that it is so popular, we incorporated DriverHeaven's latest test into our review process. Lower scores are better, and times are in seconds.

3DMark06 - We run the full suite of tests offered by 3DMark06 at 640x480 and collect the total 3DMark score and CPU score.

Doom 3, Far Cry, Unreal Tournament 2004 @ 640x480, HQ Settings - While higher resolutions tax the video card, lower resolutions rely on CPU and subsystem speed. Higher scores are better.

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 platform.

SiSoft Sandra 2007 CPU

SiSoft Sandra 2007 MMX

SiSoft Sandra 2007 Memory

All the results are pretty close. The memory tests heavily favoured the mPC C51PV. The Pentium D is a decent performer but as we've seen historically, the Athlon X2 is a much faster CPU.

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