I got an MSI WindPad 110W!

[NeoGen]

I have always been drooling over the MSI WindPad 110W since it came out, mainly because it is an AMD Powered tablet with the newest Brazos Z01 chipset and Radeon HD 6250 graphics integrated, and to top that it runs Windows 7 which is my favorite OS even among tablets. I can't stand the "walled garden" scenario that Apple and Google created for us with their tablet OS'es. You can't even access the bloody file system!

So with a generous contribution from my beloved wife (which I will have to now find new awe-tastic and creative ways to thank her), we purchased the MSI WindPad 110W as a gift for myself, as I have been behaving so well this year.

I am typing this from the tablet itself, although I am cheating because I plugged in a USB keyboard. Typing from the on-screen keyboard was just taking way too long. lol

I tried to take some pictures but the bad lighting and shaky hands (also called user inexperience) made pretty much all pics either too dark, too bright or too blurry.
Here's a couple that didn't come out too bad...

100_0341.jpg100_0342.jpg

[NeoGen]

As a very beggining user and not even having this for more than 3 hours in my hands I can say that it is kinda big compared to other tablets, and feels a little heavier than an iPad (the only other tablet I tried out).
The 32GB SSD is by no means big enough for a users needs and even after removing some of MSIs bloatware I still only have about 11 GB of free space.

I think I just got one of the very latest units off the manufacturing plant, because it came preloaded with the latest bios version that only came out about 3 weeks ago, and also it came with Recovery and drivers CDs, which initially it didn't and it was a common complain amongst owners of the first units that came out a few months ago.

The power adapter having only about 3 feet long cable is a bit annoying, and I've read on the net that some people managed to find compatible adapters with longer cords, so I think that might be something I will look for soon.

Although it is not specified in the specs, several people already reported that this unit's SD card reader is indeed compatible with the latest SDXC cards, which is a great way to expand the hard drive space, so to speak. It's a bit expensive but I am looking at 64GB SDXC cards to load in and be able to install applications and games to try out.

Lastly, to me it has a nice and sturdy look and feel, but that fan on the left side (Yes, a tablet that has a fan! unbelievable! lol) that fan is somewhat audible if it gets going. I'm thinking probably in the winter it will never kick on, but right now it's still a warm end of summer over here so the fan kicked on me already a few times.

And that's all for tonight. I will be back with boinc benchmarks and a few more tidbits and test reports tomorrow.

[NeoGen]

Ok... I have a few screenshots and tidbits to share. I had a couple of days of internet downtime, something must have happened at Comcast, but I am back online again.

First off, the windows 7 score, it's not too high but it's reasonable for a tablet
windpad windows score.jpg
As you can see the lowest score is really the CPU which is a 1.0GHz dual core, but that was expected. The gaming graphics score is outstanding for a tablet actually, I feel like throwing some games at it and see how they run.


CPU-Z still doesn't have much information on the new Brazos Z-01 apparently...
cpu-z.jpg


...and GPU-Z shows some information, but I don't know if these values are correct. It's strange because it shows as not supporting OpenCL but that may be a drivers thing I'm guessing...
gpu-z.jpg


I'm running on it BOINC 6.13.1 x64 (Pre-Release) and it seems to run great... here's the scores of BOINC's benchmarks for it.

9/22/2011 7:06:30 PM |  | Running CPU benchmarks
9/22/2011 7:06:31 PM |  | Suspending computation - CPU benchmarks in progress
9/22/2011 7:07:02 PM |  | Benchmark results:
9/22/2011 7:07:02 PM |  |    Number of CPUs: 2
9/22/2011 7:07:02 PM |  |    839 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
9/22/2011 7:07:02 PM |  |    1919 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU
9/22/2011 7:07:05 PM |  | Resuming computation

Not too bad for a dual core 1.0GHz very low power CPU.

And if you want to follow it in action, here's a few links... I added it to the non-CPU projects and also Collatz Conjecture
Collatz - http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz...p?hostid=75819
WUProp - http://wuprop.boinc-af.org/show_host...p?hostid=22623
FreeHAL - http://www.freehal.net/freehal_at_ho...p?hostid=60036
Surveill@Home - http://surveill.dei.uc.pt/surveill/s...p?hostid=12632

Just give it a few hours as it was just recently added and I think I have not let it on enough time to finish workunits yet.


Anything you guys want me to throw at it to see, I'll be happy to try.

[Beerknurd]

That is pretty cool. I want a tablet, but I just can't justify spending that much money on one. I can pretty much do everything I need to do on my iPhone. Yea, the screen is smaller, but it works for me. Maybe one of these days I will break down and get me one.

[NeoGen]

After several days running on and off, my Collatz cojecture is finished... 19 hours, 54 minutes, and 13 seconds of GPU processing. I also have Primegrid PPS Sieve WU running for 19 hours and apparently it might take about 3 more hours to finish.

The WindPad is definitely not made for hardcore crunching, but i will run non-cpu intensive projects on it like freehal, surveill and wuprop.