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First of all, note the following: the MEGA cannot be in its two incarnations at the same moment! If you use it as a computer, you won’t be able to use the MP3-player. It’s not a depressing fact, since there exist WinAmp and Windows Media Player. Radio is the only exception as you can listen to it even with the PC turned on. To do this, you only need to install a special program called MSI MEGA Radio.
The warning made, let’s get to the topic. Like any other barebone-system, MSI’s MEGA looks like a prodigy child :). It is all small and noiseless, but concealing the power of a Pentium 4 2.53GHz! And it does perform fast. So, we are running the benchmarks now to see how fast it is.
We tested MSI MEGA in comparison with a regular desktop Pentium 4 based system and AMD Athlon XP based system. The testbeds configurations looked as follows:
MSI MEGA | Intel Pentium 4 | AMD Athlon XP | |
CPU | Intel Pentium 4 2.53 | Intel Pentium 4 2.53 Intel Pentium 4 2.4B | AMD Athlon XP 2600+ AMD Athlon XP 2400+ AMD Athlon XP 2200+ |
Mainboard | MSI (SiS 651) | MSI 845GMax (i845G) | EPoX EP-8K3A+ (VIA KT333) |
Memory | PC2700 CL2 DDR SDRAM, 512 MB | ||
Graphics card | VisionTek Xtasy GeForce4 Ti 4400 | ||
HDD | IBM DTLA 307015 | ||
And here are the test results:
| MSI MEGA | Intel Pentium 4 | AMD Athlon XP | ||||
Intel Pentium 4 2.53 (533MHz QPB) SiS 315 | Intel Pentium 4 2.53 (533MHz QPB) GeForce4 Ti4400 | Intel Pentium 4 2.4B (533MHz QPB) | Intel Pentium 4 2.53 (533MHz QPB) | AMD Athlon XP 2200+ (1800MHz) | AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (2000MHz) | AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (2133MHz) | |
3DMark2001SE, Default | 1592 | 11955 | 11133 | 11267 | 10626 | 10844 | 11059 |
UT2003, Demo 640x480 | 38.49 | 178.8 | 157.08 | 162.67 | 153.63 | 159.12 | 164.57 |
PCMark2002, CPU | 6078 | 6163 | 5948 | 6270 | 5363 | 5831 | 6300 |
PCMark2002, Memory | 4523 | 5818 | 5793 | 5825 | 3536 | 3646 | 3753 |
WinRAR | 1.08 | 1.16 | 1.15 | 1.18 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.14 |
ScienceMark MolDyn | 111.23 | 100.09 | 112.43 | 106.8 | 120.47 | 117.73 | 114.95 |
ScienceMark Primordia | 722.35 | 694.47 | 719.95 | 672.36 | 573.59 | 514.49 | 509.4 |
3DMark2001 unveils two key things. Firstly, the integrated graphics runs awfully slow. Secondly, the MSI MEGA is a great gaming system if you use an add-on graphics card.
You can see another proof to that in the second benchmark, Unreal Tournament 2003. The integrated graphics is down at the bottom, while the MEGA with the normal graphics card is in the lead.
The PCMark2002 test shows how badly the «shared memory» architecture tells on the overall system performance. We get a 25% performance boost by simply installing a regular graphics card. Moreover, you can install any card, even the same SiS 315 based one, for example. It only needs to have dedicated graphics memory.
The same things hold true in WinRAR.
