MSI Megabook S271: a Look at AMD's Turion X2

Multimedia and 3D Rendering

We mentioned earlier that there are specific reasons to consider getting a dual core system, with multimedia and 3D rendering applications often showing the most benefit. We ran some video and audio encoding benchmarks on the laptops in order to demonstrate multimedia performance. For 3D rendering, we use Cinebench 9.5 in both single-CPU and multi-CPU modes. We don't have single core performance available for the multimedia benchmarks in this article, although you can get an idea of the performance advantage from previous articles on the subject.







In the multimedia benchmarks, the ASUS Core 2 Duo outperforms the MSI Turion X2 by around 20% in three of the tests, while in the QuickTime H.264 encoding test the performance difference grows to 44%. For single core 3D rendering, the ASUS A8JS once again leads by slightly more than 20%, although it's interesting to note that in the multi-CPU rendering benchmark the performance lead drops to only 13%. Given how long 3D rendering can take, however, even moderate performance improvements can be very important. Of course, you can also purchase a faster Core 2 Duo notebook processor right now, whereas the TL-60 is the fastest Turion X2 currently available. If you need a high-performance dual core processor for a laptop, and you're willing to pay for it, you would probably want a CPU faster than what we have installed in either of the tested notebooks.