MSI CR610 - a very good CPU with poor graphics and battery life

It is one of the first tigris-based notebook

MSI CR610

It is one of MSI’s latest Tigris-based notebooks, and adds to its classic series. The CR610 comes with AMD’s Athlon II CPU and RS880 chipset by ATI. It sports a 16-inch, 1366 x 768 pixel display panel, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4200 graphics controller and AMD’s dual-core Athlon II. The CR610 can house up to 4GB of memory and will come with up to 500GB of storage. MSI also throws in a 1.3MP webcam, DVD Super-Multi optical drive, WiFi 802.11 b/g/n and HDMI output. This 2 ½ kilo machine comes pre-loaded with Win 7.

Tigris platform

Earlier this year we saw AMD debut relatively a low power AMD Athlon Neo CPU for ultrathin laptops like the HP Pavilion dv2. This processor was paired with an ATI graphics card and it could handle HD video on laptops with a 12-inch display. Recently, AMD has launched a new platform for notebooks - AMD Tigris. It enables Full 1080p video support, DirectX 10.1 support, Video encoding by Radeon HD 4200 GPU and 45nm dual core Caspian CPUs (speeds ranging up to 2.6GHz). This new platform is expected to be an improvement of 42 percent for multimedia performance and 25% percent for battery life.  Users can get up to an hour and 55 minutes of "active use" and just less than five hours in idle, according to AMD.

Benchmarking by Hexus

Folks at hexus got their hands on this CR610 sample to benchmark, with a 45nm-based Athlon II Dual Core M320, clocked at 2.1GHz (800MHz in battery mode), and 1MB of L2 cache. The Mobility Radeon HD 4200 will not take too much load, but can run basic games at a low-ish resolution – as hexus points out.

The CR610 was compared to MSI X600 and an Acer Timeline 3810T, both are on CULV processors. In the CPU tests it fairs very well, lagging behind only in few places like video rendering. The 2.1GHz-clocked Athlon II does a reasonable job in our number-crunching test, helped by the Phenom architecture. Hexus found out it had a terrible battery life, also doesnot fair very well in graphics quality as well gaming tests.

Overall, this is a notebook that compromises on battery life for a very good CPU.