MSI Wind U110 Eco with ATI graphics: Fact or Fiction?

MSI lists the new Wind U100 Eco on their website stating it sports ATI graphics and 9 hr long battery life – and later shrugs it off as “miss-print”. Marketing gimmick? Read-on.

 Though you could play Far Cry 2 in your netbook soon? That remains a distant dream for now, but how we are made to believe we have come so close to it, and yet so far. MSI has always been designing notebooks that cater to the extreme gamers and multi-media enthusiasts, and recently their website revealed the new Wind U110 Eco netbook which comes with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 graphics card. Too good to be true? Well, we thought so as well.

First let’s talk about the machine. MSI positions it as the “world's power saving No.1 Netbook!” with battery life of about 9 hrs with its 6-cell battery. It sports the usual netbook specs with an Intel Atom Z530 (1.6 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 512 KB cache) processor to the 1 GB of DDR2 RAM (max of 2 GB) to its 160 GB hard drive. The processor is based on Intel’s Menlow platform. It also includes the widely popular 10-inch LCD (with a 1024 x 600 resolution), 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 160GB SATA hard drive, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0 (optional), a 1.3-megapixel webcam and two built-in speakers. You'll also get three USB 2.0 sockets, a microphone input, headphone output, Ethernet port and a VGA video output. It weighs just under a kilogram without the battery.

Now the controversy – Tom’s hardware and a few other websites say that the MSI website mentions the ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 as the U110 Eco’s discrete graphics card. But Laptopmag reports that although there were early reports indicating that it would have an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 graphics card, but Andy Tung of MSI confirmed this was a misprint on the company’s Website. The ATI graphics was never officially confirmed though. Is it an attempt to draw attention, or just a harmless mistake? Well I am open to comments.