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| Introduction, Specifications, and Bundle | ||||
When Shuttle first thrust small form factor systems upon the Do-It-Yourself crowd in 2001, they were deemed niche products that wouldn't likely appeal to the masses, due to inherent expandability deficiencies and limited feature-sets relative to full-sized desktop systems. Over the last half decade though, interest in small form factor systems has steadily increased, and the mini-machines have evolved into something far more appealing than many users had ever expected. Modern small form factor machines now have feature-sets that rival many full-sized desktop systems, and expandability is only limited by what can be physically crammed into the enclosure. Shuttle in particular has spearheaded the small form factor movement by quickly and consistently churning out top-notch barebones XPC systems based on virtually every major core-logic chipset. But other manufactures have steadily expanded on their SFF product offerings as well. MSI comes to mind as a company that initially approached the SFF market with some trepidation, but has since found their stride, so to speak. MSI now has three different series of slim and small form factor PCs (Hetis, mPC, and Crystal), each with distinctly different feature sets and target audiences. The SFF system we'll be looking at today is the latest addition to the mPC line, the 51PV. The mPC 51PV is designed for the AMD socket AM2 platform. The system is equipped with a host of integrated peripherals and was obviously well thought out from the start. We'll explain why we think so on the pages ahead.
MSI ships the mPC 51PV with a minimal assortment of bundled accessories. Because this machine is fully pre-wired and requires minimal assembly, MSI did not have to throw in an array of cables, mounting hardware, etc. Instead, all you'll find in the box are a user's manual, power cord, driver / utility CD, a WiFi antenna, and a CPU cooler. The CPU cooler features a solid copper base with aluminum fins, three heat-pipes, and a fan. Thermal grease also came pre-applied to the base. We should note that the CPU cooler is the only part of the MSI mPC that requires a tool to be installed. There are four Philips-head screws at each corner that mate with the mounting hardware inside the system. The screws are spring-loaded, so when all four are tightly fastened, the cooler should make perfect contact with the CPU underneath. |
| A Look At The Exterior |
If you've seen any of the previous products in the mPC line-up, you'll probably be familiar with the checkerboard, Rubik's Cube-like front fascia used on the 51PV. Some of MSI's mPCs feature white, or off white, enclosures, which makes the checkerboard pattern really stand out. The mPC 51PV, however, features an all black finish, with silver trim, which makes the pattern appear more subdued, and in our opinion more appealing.
The front of the unit in laid out as you might expect. At the top of the unit, there is a fold-down optical drive bay cover that conceals the drive. The middle section in home to a lighted power button, and a optical drive eject/close button. We should note that this button is electronic, and sends a command to open and close the drive. And there's no configuration necessary. So no fumbling with small plastic pieces trying to line up an eject button during assembly. The bottom of the unit feature another fold-down bay cover, that hides the unit's built-in 7-in-1 card reader, and USB, Firewire, and front-panel audio ports.
The rear of the unit is similarly well equipped. At the top you'll see the nub for the mPC 51PV's integrated WiFi NIC antenna. There are also a pair of fan grilles, a power switch, and power receptacle, and of course a densely packed I/O cluster. In the I/O cluster you'll fine six assorted analog and digital audio ports, PS/2 mouse and serial ports, Component, S-Video, DB15, and DVI video outputs, four USB ports, and a single RJ45 LAN jack. |
| Interior and Assembly |
Removing the mPC 51PV's case cover reveals a well laid out motherboard. All of the board's connecters and cables are situated in small clusters at the front corners of the board. And all power, data, and header cables come pre-connected.
This makes for a very easy assembly, and a clean, wide-open path down the center of the board. This is important because the CPU cooler blows air across its heatsink, towards the back of the system, where it is then expelled by the rear exhaust fan. This "wind-tunnel" configuration worked well, and kept an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ running properly for literally weeks on end. We should also note that the fans in this SFF PC can be quite loud when spinning at their maximum speeds, but they only seemed to do so during the POST. Once the dynamic BIOS fan controls kicked in, all of the system's fan spun down considerably and the unit remained relatively quiet. Even after hours of gaming, the fans never spun up to a distracting level.
The motherboard in the mPC 51PV is based on NVIDIA's C51PV chipset which features a GeForce 6150 IGP. The 6150 is a basic integrated graphics processor, but should a user want something more powerful, the system is outfitted with single PCI Express x16 and standard PCI expansion slots. Unfortunately, there are no spare power leads coming form the unit's 260W PSU, so graphics cards that require supplemental power will need to be connected via power cable splitters and adapters. Audio duties on the board are handled by a Realtek HD codec, Gigabit LAN by a Vitesse chip, and WiFi comes by way of a Ralink mini-PC card. Assembly of the mPC 51PV could not be easier. Simply pulling up on a handle at the rear of the main drive cage unlocks it, and causes it to swing upwards. You'll then have easy access to the CPU and DIMM slots. And all the drives can be installed without any tools. Just slide them into position and lock them into place with the provided locking mechanisms. Then its just a matter of connecting a couple of data cables which are already pre-routed into the correct positions. One thing you may have noticed looking through the pictures above is that there are basically no open headers or connectors on the mPC 51PV's motherboard. The system is meant to be a streamlined, mainstream mini-PC, and as such there are no connectors or headers for devices than can't be installed in the enclosure. This limits the expandability of the mPC 51PV, but it also helps cut costs and minimize internal system clutter. |
| The BIOS and NO-verclocking | ||||
The MSI mPC 51PV is equipped with a Phoenix/Award BIOS derivative that is is relatively complete and easy to navigate. From within the BIOS users have the ability to configure, enable or disable all of the board's integrated peripherals, and monitor voltages and temperatures.
The mPC 51PV has a relatively well equipped BIOS, provided overclocking is low on your list of priorities. In fact, the mPC 51PV has no overclocking options in the BIOS at all. This is somewhat of a let down, but considering that machine is not targeted at enthusiasts and managing thermals in a small form factor enclosure is far more difficult than it is in a full sized case, a lack of overclocking options isn't a major detriment. As far as the other more mainstream BIOS options go, the mPC 51PV is fairly well off. All of the integrated peripherals can be managed from within the BIOS, including the IGP which can have its frame buffer allocation and TV output mode altered. There is also a fairly well appointed hardware monitoring section where user's have the ability to tweak fan speeds based on a predetermined temperature threshold. |
| Our Test Systems and PCMark05 | |||||||||||
How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 1024MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
The MSI mPC 51PV hung alongside Asus' M2N32-SLI in PCMark05's CPU performance module, but ultimately fell shy of the mark set by the full sized board. Asus has been known to goose clock speeds a bit even at default settings though, and the mPC 51PV isn't designed for hardcore enthusiasts, so we harp on the <200 point different seen here. "The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing." - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.
PCMark05's memory performance module also had the MSI mPC 51PC finishing just behind the Asus MSN32-SLI board. The Intel-based systems took the lead here, but we'll be focusing on the performance of delta separating the AMD powered rigs in this article. The Intel scores are here for reference purposes only. |
| Office XP SP2 and Photoshop 7 | ||||
PC World Magazine's WorldBench 5.0 is a new breed of Business and Professional application benchmark, that has replaced the aging and no-longer supported Content Creation and Business Winstone tests in our suite. WorldBench 5.0 consists of a number of performance modules that each utilize one, or a group of popular applications to gauge performance.
Below we have the results from WB 5's Office XP SP2 and Photoshop 7 modules, recorded in seconds. Lower times indicate better performance here, so the shorter the bar the better.
The MSI mPC 51PV performed relatively well in Worldbench 5.0's Office and Photoshop benchmark modules. The SFF PC finished within a few seconds of the full-sized Asus nForce 590 SLI based motherboard, and even outpaced the Pentium Extreme Edition 965. The Core 2 Duo powered rig was in a league of its own, but by now, you've all heard the Core 2 Duo's dominant performance before. |
| LAME MT MP3 Encoding | ||||
In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a very popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content.
In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file (a never-ending Grateful Dead jam) and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below. Once again, shorter times equate to better performance.
Our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding benchmark showed no variation between the two AMD-powered platforms. The Intel rigs were faster overall, but he MSI mPC 51PV performed identically to Asus' nForce 590 SLI-based M2N32-SLI. |
| Kribibench v1.1 | ||||
For this next batch of tests, we ran Kribibench v1.1, a 3D rendering benchmark produced by the folks at Adept Development. Kribibench is an SSE aware software renderer where a 3D model is rendered and animated by the host CPU, and the average frame rate is reported.
We used two of the included models with this benchmark: a "Sponge Explode" model consisting of over 19.2 million polygons and the test suite's "Ultra" model that is comprised of over 16 billion polys.
The MSI mPC 51PV pulled off the upset in the Kribibench 3D rendering benchmark. While rendering both the sponge explode and ultra models, the mPC 51PV rig just slightly higher frame rates then the similarly equipped Asus motherboard. |
| Cinebench and 3DMark06 | ||||||||
The Cinebench 2003 benchmark is an OpenGL 3D rendering performance test, based on the commercially available Cinema 4D application.
This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a single 3D scene and tracks the length of the entire process. The time it took each test system to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below (listed in seconds).
It was another tight race in the Cinebench rendering benchmark. With both the single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks, the mPC 51PV was a fraction of a second slower than the M2N32-SLI. The deltas of .2 and .1 second are hardly anything to get excited about though.
3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded "gaming related" DirectX metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems. This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are generated with a software renderer, which is dependent on the host CPU's performance. This means that the calculations normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the central processor. The number of frames generated per second in each test are used to determine the final score.
We had more of the same in the 3DMark06 CPU benchmark. The MSI mPC 51PV finished just slightly behind the "full-sized" Asus M2N32-SLI, and both of the AMD powered rigs trailed the Intel systems. |
| F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 | ||||||||
To start our in-game testing, we did some low-resolution benchmarking with F.E.A.R. When testing motherboards and processors with F.E.A.R, we drop the resolution to 640x480, and lower all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.
We had another close race in the low-resolution F.E.A.R. benchmark. Here, the MSI mPC 51PV put up a framerate of 172 frame per second, only 7 FPS off the mark set by the M2N32-SLI.
For our next game test, we benchmarked all of the test systems using a custom single-player Quake 4 timedemo. Here, we installed the game's official v1.2 patch which is SMP capable, tuned the resolution down to 640x480, and configured the game to run at its "Low-Quality" graphics setting. Although Quake 4 typically taxes today's high-end GPUs, when it's configured at these minimal settings, it too is more CPU and memory-bound than anything else.
The low-resolution Quake 4 benchmark told a similar story, with the small form factor MSI mPC 51PV finishing within a few frames per second of the full-sized Asus M2N32-SLI. |
| Our Summary and Conclusion | ||||
Performance Summary: The MSI mPC 51PV performed just like a full-sized Asus motherboard, when outfitted with similar components. Throughout all of our tests, this MSI small form factor PC finished within a few percentage points of the M2N32-SLI and put up numbers in-line with expectations. The fact that the MSI mPC 51PV performed on-par with its "full-sized" competition shows that users don't have to sacrifice performance should they opt for a small form factor system.
We really like the MSI mPC 51PV. We understand that some of you reading this may be put off by this system's lack of overclocking tools and somewhat limited expansion options, but the mPC 51PV was designed with a specific audience in mind. It was designed for mainstream users looking for a highly integrated system, and we feel that these users will be more than pleased by the mPC 51PV. Hardcore power-users should obviously look elsewhere. But anyone in the market for an affordable small form factor system should give this machine serious consideration. It's loaded with features like an IGP, Firewire, HD Audio, Gigabit Ethernet, a 7-in-1 card reader, and an integrated WiFi NIC, it's rock solid stable, performs well, and it's incredibly easy to assemble. The MSI mPC 51PV is also competitively priced at about $240 according to our Pricegrabber search engine. Slap a CPU, RAM, hard drive and an optical drive into this system and you're done. Based on its complete feature-set, ease of assembly, performance and competitive price, we're giving the MSI mPC 51PV a solid 8.5 on the Heat Meter.
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