MSI Wind U110 ECO Netbook Runs for 9 Hours (Updated)

msi_wind_u110_eco_1Akihibara News caught an interesting press release out of MSI this morning. Seems that the U110 netbook that I’ve enjoyed for several months is getting an eco-friendly fraternal twin. Essentially, this is an under-the-hood refresh of the original U110 and offers a potentially longer run-time. I get around five hours of typical, productive work time on my U110, but MSI figures the U110 ECO netbook will see up to nine hours. That’s probably best-case or a low-stress computing environment, but even eight hours is what I’d call a full computing day. So how’d they do it?

MSI swapped out the Intel Atom N270 CPU with a Z530, which saves a little bit in wattage from the get-go. The chipset moves to a Poulsbo US15W, and MSI found room to pair all of this with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD3200 GPU as well. There’s no hybrid SSD/hard drive mode like MSI’s U115 that gets stellar battery life, so all other optimizations are likely in power management features. MSI says that a 1GB RAM module is installed, but the chipset does support 2GB of RAM like my U110 does. They added support for faster 802.11n WiFi as well, but that’s not enough of a reason for me to personally upgrade.

Update: Pierre from Blogeee.net sent me an e-mail indicating that MSI’s press release might not be accurate. He says that there isn’t any graphics component from ATI in the netbook, and that it may use the standard Intel integrated graphics we’ve seen in most every other netbook out there. This begs the question: if the only difference between the U110 and U110 ECO is the Intel chipset, is it likely that the device gets roughly a 50% run-time boost?

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