MSI Wind Box Intel Atom 330 NetTops

Both of the Wind Box computers with their MSI motherboards depended upon an American Megatrends Inc BIOS. Each BIOS exposes only the bare number of configurable options, and unlike some nettops (such as the ASRock ION 330HT-BD Blu-ray), there is no overclocking support for the Atom 330 or any other enthusiast-oriented options that can be tweaked.

With each of these systems, we installed a Samsung 250GB Serial ATA hard drive as well as 1GB of DDR2-533MHz system memory. Both systems had no problems running Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshots. This really is not much of a surprise considering this is normal hardware for netbooks/nettops and with that said it has been a while since we have encountered any Atom problems with recent distribution releases. During our testing, the Atom 330 CPUs would normally run between 30 and 40°C within the MSI Wind Box chassis. We have many Linux benchmarks from both of these MSI Wind Box nettops, but those will come in articles to be published next week. Benchmarks from these Atom-powered devices will also be coming daily through the new Phoromatic Tracker project we are going to announce shortly.

From our experiences with the MSI Wind Box 6667BB-003US and 6667BB-004US models, they are quite nice. The 6667BB-003US retails for just $140 USD at NewEgg.com with the Intel integrated graphics or the model with the Radeon HD 4330 goes for $170 USD at NewEgg.com. While no disk drive or system memory is bundled with these systems, these prices are quite good especially for packing a dual-core Intel Atom 330 processor. The MSI Wind Box enclosure is very small and offers sufficient connectivity though we would much rather see the VGA D-Sub be replaced by DVI or HDMI (in the case of the Intel GMA unit). It would also be convenient if it was easier to swap out the system memory on the MSI motherboard, but this is only a small nuisance. The only major complaint we have about either unit is the extensive use of plastic on the chassis, which is easily breakable with both of our units now having broken front panels. What's also nice about these units is that the lone fan is inaudible when any distance away from the system and its temperatures were also very comfortable.

There are also a variety of other MSI Wind Box systems available (at Amazon.com for example). Please use our shopping links when making Internet purchases to help us in supporting our operations.