It's an odd introduction because the MSI Wind U230 is a newer model with older hardware built in. The K10.5-based ultramobile processors from AMD are starting to trickle onto the market, but MSI is opting to offer the U230 using an Athlon Neo X2 L335 based off the older K8 core. Despite the venerable core that debuted with the Athlon 64 so long ago starting to show its age, it's still at least a reasonable alternative to people who don't want to suffer with Atom's "just enough" performance along with integrated graphics that get worse with each progressive generation (at least the GMA 950 could drive an HDMI port).

MSI's Wind U230 comes with specs that may seem somewhat familiar to those of you who read our review of the most recent Acer Ferrari One (a line with an unfortunate history of underpowered AMD hardware at exorbitant prices):

MSI's U230 brings to the table the hardware we've come to expect from AMD's last generation Congo platform. AMD's original ultramobile left a lot to be desired, but a 1.6GHz dual core processor coupled with the capable ATI Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics shores up the overwhelming majority of weaknesses in Intel's Atom platform. The K8 may be old kit, but it still features out-of-order execution and superior performance clock-for-clock against the Atom, and the Radeon HD 3200 is capable of doing very light gaming. More importantly, though, the HD 3200 brings full high definition acceleration to the table, an improvement only heightened with the release of Adobe's hardware-accelerated Flash 10.1.

The rest of the U230 is fully-featured, offering up a 320GB hard drive, wireless-n capability, Bluetooth, and Gigabit networking. MSI also makes the interesting and very consumer-friendly choice of opting to include a single 2GB DIMM for memory and leaving a memory slot free rather than installing a pair of 1GB sticks. That leaves the U230 open to upgrade later, and unlike smaller netbooks, the bottom panel of the unit also allows the user to change out the hard drive proper. And finally, because of its larger form factor, the U230 sports a bigger keyboard than netbooks have and a full 720p (768p) resolution screen instead of the scrunched down 1024x600 found on most smaller machines.

Of course, there's an exchange one must make for all this goodness. Even ignoring the price of the U230, which is competitive without being particularly hungry for success, the extra performance provided by AMD's Congo platform takes a heavy toll on heat and battery life compared to Atom-based netbooks. Atom and the accompanying GMA 3150 may not do a heck of a lot, but they can usually do that little bit for a solid eight hours on a standard 6-cell battery. Congo-based notebooks are lucky to hit half that, and they'll often run a heck of a lot warmer in the process.

The MSI Wind U230 isn't hideous, but it's not exactly the best looker in the world either. MSI notebooks have, at least in our experience, generally been questionable where styling is concerned. While their X-Slim lineup is typically pretty attractive, their more functional lines tend to be just that: fairly cheap looking and functional. They're not the glowing glossy eyesores that Toshiba continues to foist on an unwilling populace, but it can't be denied that many of the Taiwanese OEMs (MSI, Asus, Compal, Clevo) are short some of the style that other companies not named Toshiba can produce. Asus has only recently made waves with the G73's chassis, but everything else has always looked functional first and foremost, with styling a secondary consideration.

Take the lid, for example. MSI uses the same glossy plastic we've come to expect from modern notebooks, black with a silver MSI logo emblazoned in the center. Recently we reviewed a Samsung N210 netbook that had a similar design cue, but just by shrinking the logo and justifying it to the left makes the unit feel more distinctive.

When you open the machine you find the same tired hinge style that's become the de facto standard on netbooks and ultraportables, but the bezel is at least a lot thinner than you typically see on netbooks with 10.2" panels, and MSI opted to employ a black matte plastic here that's much appreciated. The understated silver MSI logo at the top left of the bezel is also a nice accent. At the top you'll find the built-in microphone and the webcam, inauspiciously placed where you've come to expect them.

Moving on to the body of the U230 is the standard glossy surface plate and matte plastic "undercarriage." The glossy plastic is at least an understated gunmetal gray color that's pleasing to the eye, and while most manufacturers just love their blue LEDs whether they make sense or not, the blue really does work in the U230's favor, contrasting beautifully with the color of the inside surface.

MSI also makes sure to use the full width of the unit's body to produce a healthy-sized keyboard, and Jarred and I went back and forth briefly in e-mail about it. Jarred was very impressed with it, especially coming off the dismal keyboard on the Acer Ferrari (seriously Acer, just stop! That keyboard style is horrendous and we don't know why you insist on using it on everything and polluting your Gateway line with it.) I actually had retail experience with this same chassis in a different configuration at a local Fry's and found the keyboard there curiously mushy, but the one on this review unit seems a lot firmer. MSI even managed to fit the navigational row typically seen on larger notebooks onto the right side of the keyboard without severely hampering usability. While it can't compete with the keyboard on Lenovo's ThinkPad x100e, the U230's keyboard is still very usable.

The touchpad planted just beneath the keyboard is also a simple, clean, easy design: it has a lightly textured matte surface that's comfortable to use, and heaven forbid, two dedicated mouse buttons that offer just the right amount of click and response. It's a nice change of pace from seeing countless machines that use rockers for the mouse buttons, or worse, the dreadful "unipad" style on HP and Dell netbooks that apes the clicking touchpad from modern Mac portables without actually being any good. Put simply, it works and works well.

When you get to the bottom of the U230 you'll find one simple access plate for swapping out (or adding) RAM, the wireless minicard, and the standard issue 2.5" hard disk. The six-cell battery tilts the unit up (as is common on notebooks this size), and that's good...because the bottom of this thing gets very hot, and that vent on the left hand side spews heat like you wouldn't believe when the fan has to kick up. It's very audible, very hot, and unfortunate given how functional the rest of the U230 is.

MSI chose to outfit the Wind U230 with the typical glossy 1366x768 screen found on other 12.1" portables, but mercifully it's a pretty good screen from cursory inspection. The hinge doesn't tilt the screen back very far, but the limit is actually about where the ideal angle is going to be. Viewing angles and uniformity, at least from first glance, are solid.

Solid relative to the competition, at least. The results sit right in the middle of our charts, but the fact of the matter is that outside of the high contrast LCD on the ASUS 1001P (and the older 1005HA), all of the LCDs look similar. The higher resolution of the U230 display is a real selling point over standard Atom netbooks, but there's not much else to recommend it.

Application performance of the AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335, a 1.6 GHz dual core based on AMD's old K8 architecture, isn't likely to be full of many surprises, and the Radeon HD 3200 graphics are a known quantity at this point. The MSI U230 should surpass the Acer Ferrari One, thanks to the faster CPU, but otherwise they're about the same.

The important takeaway is to look at how the L335 coupled with the HD 3200 outclasses not only Atom-based netbooks (including dual-core Atom and Ion-based machines), but also produces a commanding lead over the Acer Ferrari's 1.2 GHz Athlon X2. It's true it can't compete with Intel's CULV platform, but that's a given; we've known for a long time that K8 can't compete clock-for-clock with anything Conroe-derived onward, what we're looking for here is a compromise between the sometimes painful sluggishness of the Atom and the price of a CULV-based dual core, and MSI's Wind U230 more or less delivers one.

The other interesting item to note is the graphics performance. Sure, AMD can't touch the performance of CULV with their Neo processors, though they can often come close with a 300MHz advantage over the 1.3GHz SU4100 and SU7300. However, in the graphics department even the HD 3200 is head and shoulders above the GMA 4500MHD. And let's not even talk about the pathetic GMA 3150 in Pine Trail! Besides being faster for gaming (though you'll struggle in most 3D games at the native 1366x768), the HD 3200 also manages to handle HD video decoding much better than the 4500MHD. YouTube 720p content works quite well on the U230, with relatively low CPU usage, though the 4500MHD can usually manage to run such content without dropping frames. The real kicker is that both CULV and AMD's Ultraportable platforms typically provide HDMI output—something you'll need ION to get on Atom.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the added performance comes with a drawback or two….

Battery Life and a Wrinkle or Two

Unfortunately, the improved performance of the L335 exacts its price in blood. Specifically, the blood of your battery.

It's pretty dismal. A machine this small begs to be off the chain, but here AMD's power-hungry Congo platform makes its presence known, ensuring a useful lifetime on the battery of a shade over three hours. That's about enough to get through one lecture in a class, but it's inexcusable for a machine that's otherwise so small. And when 720p playback is brought into the picture, battery life dips under three hours.

What's interesting, however, is discovering how AMD handles their power savings on the Athlon Neo X2 L335. Simply put, they don't. While researching this notebook and others that use Athlon Neo processors, many other users have tried to squeeze more battery life out of AMD's hardware and met with some success. That success stems from undervolting the processor using RMClock, and it's actually pretty effective at adding a good half hour or so to the battery.

A major part of the problem seems to be that AMD volts the Athlon Neo X2 extremely aggressively. Our review unit has a standard voltage of one volt on the processor, and that voltage is consistent regardless of the clock speed the chip is running at. That means that whether the chip is running at full tilt 1.6 GHz or the more "power economical" 800 MHz, it has the exact same amount of voltage coursing through it, throwing heat and spinning up the fan.

Using a combination of RMClock and IntelBurnTest, we were able to bring the voltage of the processor at 1.6 GHz down to just .825V, a substantial .175V difference, and at each multiplier step we were further able to reduce the voltage of the chip by at least .025V. It's a major improvement; when testing stability at 1.3 GHz with a voltage of .75V using the gruelling IntelBurnTest, we found the system fan barely span up more than its usual hum and certainly didn't get anywhere near as loud as it did at the full volt. If anything it's a shame the chips don't ship better tuned from the factory, because they're clearly capable of performing at least a little better and a little more efficiently.

MSI has opted to outfit the Wind U230 with a hot AMD processor near the end of its life, but a processor that nonetheless at least has some legs to it. What we want to look at is the value angle. Does the Wind U230's last generation technology at least offer a decent value for the price?

Well, there are a lot of drawbacks. The 18-watt TDP of the AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335 is ungainly for a notebook this size and MSI's engineering doesn't seem to manage it quite as well as we might hope. What results is a lot of heat and not much battery life, and one of the real bummers is discovering that somewhere along the line, no one seemed to care. MSI touts a four hour battery life for the U230 like it's a major benefit, but four hours of running time is at the high end of the curve for the mainstream notebook and dismal for an ultraportable; where exactly do we fit the U230 in? Vivek seemed to think six hours was a reasonable expectation in his review of the Acer Ferrari One and that's a fair assessment.

While performance of the L335 is certainly a far cry ahead of the Atom and makes the machine feel more flexible and responsive - like a full-on, fully capable computer - that wattage is onerous, and it's utterly uncompetitive with Intel's CULV platform, to say nothing of the low-voltage Arrandale chips that are wending their way into the market. What you really wind up paying for is the Radeon HD 3200 integrated graphics part, which brings a healthier and more capable driver ecosystem to the table, especially compared to the abysmal GMA 3150 Intel opted to saddle modern Atom processors with.

So what do you get for a touch under five bills? In that respect there's a lot to like in the Wind U230. The 1.6 GHz dual core processor, capacity for 4GB of DDR2, and Radeon HD 3200 IGP combine to form a capable if uninspiring performance profile. You're not going to be running any state of the art games on it, but it's definitely fast enough for the odd jaunt through World of Warcraft or, more importantly for some of us nerds, it plays Magic: the Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers - a game truly destined for killing time on ultraportables - quite adequately. MSI also outfits the notebook with all the connectivity you could ask for: gigabit ethernet, wireless-n, and Bluetooth are all available here.

And finally, there are the screen and keyboard. Moving to a twelve inch form factor means vastly improved ergonomics with the keyboard and a substantially less cramped screen, and in each of these cases MSI makes the best of the added real estate. The screen is attractive and easy to use, and the keyboard is one of the better ones we've tested.

It's going to come down to a matter of compromise. A visit to NewEgg shows the Wind U230 is priced about where it ought to be at $479, being neither a mind-blowing deal nor an utter rip-off. If Atom and Ion aren't going to cut it for you as far as performance is concerned, are you willing to deal with a warmer, noisier notebook with substantially lower battery life? It's a compromise most probably won't be willing to make, but it's also not a homerun in favor of Atom and Ion machines either. The tweak-happy user willing to muddle through a couple of days of RMClock and IntelBurnTest may be able to largely mitigate the drawbacks of the U230, but even despite them, it remains an excellent option for users who need a little more notebook than netbook.

The chassis and design elements are about right, but what MSI needs to do now is work on the internals a bit more. Congo is obviously on the way out, and MSI has said that the L335 model will be discontinued rather quickly now. Oddly, the cheaper but substantially less powerful MV-40 equipped model may stick around a bit longer, but with half the processor performance we're less keen on that configuration. What we'd really like to see is an update to AMD's Nile platform, with a substantial boost in battery life. The K325/K625/K665 drop the TDP 3W, and if voltages are tweaked for better idle power draw, such a laptop might be a winner. Early reports of the Dell Inspiron M301z indicate idle battery life of over 5.5 hours, and that's with a 44Wh battery. (Sadly, the M301z appears to be a UK/Europe SKU only at present, as we cannot configure one in the US.) Just imagine what the U230 could do with the new CPU and its 58Wh battery. Hopefully MSI will help us find out.