Msi U230?

Looks like a fair price.

 

How can I tell whether my U230 graphics is PCIe or AGP?

 

Mwave has been around a long time. i've bought thousands of dollars of gear from them over the years, never had a problem, so assuming nothing has changed recently, I think you're ok with these guys. Haven't shopped the price on this specific unit, but there was a reason I was buying from them

seer

 

That's not an X2, even though it's stated as so:

This is an X2:

Newegg.com - MSI Wind12 U230-040US AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335(1.60GHz) 12.1" WXGA 2GB Memory 320GB HDD Netbook


Single core:

Newegg.com - MSI Wind12 U230-033US AMD Athlon Neo MV-40(1.60GHz) 12.1" WXGA 2GB Memory 250GB HDD Netbook

Dual core:

Newegg.com - MSI Wind12 U230-040US AMD Athlon Neo X2 L335(1.60GHz) 12.1" WXGA 2GB Memory 320GB HDD Netbook

I would buy the latter, especially since it has BT and a larger HD.

 

If you really want to know about the inner workings of your computer, use something like SiSoft Sandra. As far as the u230 is concerned, the IGP sits on a pcie lane.

 

Hello All! really digging the u230 so far, handles blueray rips via hdmi to the tv wonderfully. However I have had a few issues. Has anyone had any success finding all the drivers for a 64 bit os? I am running windows 7 ultimate 64. I have found some of the drivers but have not been able to get the function keys to work. Also overdrive is crashing every time I open it. I have overdrive 3.2. The AMD GPU overclocking tool is installed and working, but really want to get overdrive up. I created an .iso of the driver disk and most of the software would not install. Got the bluetooth to work. I would like to get the function keys working, I liked the volume and brightness interface before i switched OS. If anyone has had any success with any of the issues I am having please chime in with how you got it working. Thanks.

 

edit: got some of the function keys working but the cool little icon showing volume level/ brightness/etc. no longer pops up. Still looking for known 64 bit drivers for windows 7.

 

I think the problem is there's a genuine lack of 64 bit support.

 

About the Windows 7 64 bit drivers...

The Bluetooth and WIFI x64 drivers are incluided in the x86 MSI drivers. BT drivers arent really needed(unless you like the Toshiba stack), SO standart ones work perfectly, WIFI ones are needed since the incluided in the SO dont work correctly.

Sound ones can be downloaded from the Realtek website.

LAN/BT/Memory reader/Touchpad/Webcam are incluided in the Win 7 X64 and arent needed.

MSI System Control Management (SCM), work perfectly well for both x86 and x64.

Chipset drivers are avalible at amd website.
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_chipset.aspx

and finally, amd radeon mobile drivers.

ATI Mobility Radeon 10.6 Drivers Direct Links - Guru3D.com Forums

Catalyst 10.6 brings better performance for flash player 10.1 h.264 videos.

 

Thanks much for the links! I have already found pretty much all of the drivers. However the MSI utilities on the CD would not work for me at all. I created an .iso of the cd and tried to install but was unable to on Win7 ultimate x64. Pretty whack MSI doesn't have better 64 bit support. I have been playing with overclocking and have found less stability with 600 and 700 mhz overclocks rather than just disabling powerplay and letting it run at 500. Man I lvoe this netbook tho such a powerhouse for the size. I really can;t wait for the U250
!!

 

I was talking about the one you can download at MSI site.. i never used the cd really.

 

The U250 now apears at the MSI site, and it has both x86 and x64 drivers... we might try those for the U230.

 

I'm still unsure which way to go:

 

Damaged my keyboard and MSI won't repair it because I bought it from Argos. The company Argos use want £60 + parts to fix it. Anyone know where I can get a Uk keyboard from so i can do it myself.

 

seem likely the new neo, the K325 performs slower than the L335.

 

Get the lower latency RAM. It seems MSI won't release a BIOS that allows for faster-rated RAM to run at lower latency when underclocked.

 

Where can I buy this lappy with the 9 cell battery ?

How much hours do you get out of this battery with light surfing ?

Is this a matte screen ?

 

So, a pretty basic question: as others here have had good success with a pair of 2GB DDR2 667MHz CL5 modules, is there any reason why a pair of CL4 sticks wouldn't work as well?

I'm debating between the CL5 memory that vig1lant3 said he's using without trouble (SK):

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Laptop Memory Model F2-5300CL5D-4GBSK

...and the CL4 version (SQ):

G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 667 (PC2 5300) Dual Channel Kit Laptop Memory Model F2-5300CL4D-4GBSQ

Aside from the heat spreader on the SK (and the latency difference), they appear to be identical. They're within $2 of each other, so price isn't a consideration. Any reason why the lower-latency RAM wouldn't work?

 

Ever heard of Svet? Get a modded BIOS.

 

Hi All, I am newbie here, i am from Indonesia, and Nice to join here

No, This one is Glossy ...

Svet? i never heard that name before... Modded bios? MSi u230?

 

Upped the ram on my u230-040 (l335) to 8gb using 2 4gb sticks of mushkin 667 cas5.
I read that 4gb limit as per channel not as a whole.
Now to up the OS to win7 x64 through technet.

 

Thanks to everyone here. I had purchased a u230 WITH windows 7 x64 recently. It uses the MV-40 single core processor. It seemed to burn through it's battery when unpluged and ran like a jet engine when plugged in. I thought it was odd that it generated so much heat but I thought it had to do with a less efficient AMD processor. In reality MSI missed a few steps on battery optimization.

After running RMClock with the signed driver for Windows 7x64 (see below link to undervolting guide), I found I was able to unlock the processor's full potential for both speed and power savings. I have my p states at .65v for 800mhz and .8v for 1600mhz. My fan is super quiet now and I can play high definition videos on battery.
Prior to RMClock, my laptop was locked at 800mhz on battery. Now it will run all the way up to 1600mhz (with several in between speeds such as 1000 and 1200mhz) and gives me better battery life than it did locked at 800mhz.
I also tweaked RMClock to wait 2000ms (2 sec) and set the threshold to 85% CPU load before it'll up the clock speed to the next level.

This gives me battery life similar to the Atom based netbook I replaced with this. The U230 is like a full size laptop in a netbook case. I'm running large apps on it like I would a desktop.

I just can't figure out how MSI missed these crucial power steps.
With this setup I believe I'm getting at least 1 hr extra time on the battery and I get full performance out of the CPU when unplugged. I notice some 720p movies want the processor to run at 900mhz or 1ghz. Watching these wouldn't have been possible without RMClock.

If you own one of these, please look at the undervolting guide

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...arket-upgrades/235824-undervolting-guide.html

 

I looked into undervolting mine using the forum guide and RMClock, but found it all a bit confusing so never revisited it.

 

Hello,
My U230 came in Thursday from ebay. Purchased As Is. Condition is excellent, but having crazy stability issues. Laptop shuts down whenever it feels like it. Fresh Win7 Pro 32-bit install w/ MSI drivers, fully patched. Attached are (2) screenshots from HWMonitor, temps seem a little on the high side, while just idling.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

Bios: A1243AMR Ver1.19 02/01/2010
PowerNow = Enabled
PowerPlay = Enabled
Eco = Office Mode

Idle Time: 5mins.
Imageshack - msiq.png

Idle Time: 15mins.
Imageshack - si2.png

 

turbogaming, thanks for the info. I have seen that site but I hadn't had a chance to go through it since I was trying to fix the horrible performance on battery rather than reduce voltage. I've had my PC for 1 day and all was great until I took the pc off the adapter while playing a 360p youtube vid. Noticed horrible stutters in fullscreen, it was a W-T-F moment.

Would it be possible to post some screen shots of your RMClock set up? If not I will go through and mess with the configuration then post my results. Its so aggravating that MSI locked the BIOS. Usually the companies enable the option for maximized performance or battery life while off mains (i.e. HP/Compaq), but MSI has not.

I will contact them about this issue, if they wont create a BIOS update for this I will look at modifying the BIOS config at the code level.

Regards

 

Actually figured out the issue I was having with the undervolt. Power consumption and heat have improved by more than 20%. Now if we could just get SetFSB to work on the MV-40 U230s...

 

A little update... I now have my MSI U230 MV-40 running at 2 GHz OC. I'm beta testing now so far so good at 2 GHz .925v.

Only downside is that once you alter the Bus speed the GPU downclocks to 383 MHz. I'm still working on this issue...

I'll have more updates later.

 

A new version of SetFSB is available now supporting our chipset. I'd like to thank Abo-san for adding support. I approached him about updating his program to support the U230 about 2 weeks ago, after some looking around he notified me that support wasn't possible because he did't have access to the Clock Generator's datasheet and that he could add support if I could acquire it. I was able to get the datasheet from the OEM and Abo had the program working within 4 hours.

I have been testing various FSB speeds in combination with RMClock for multiplier and Voltage regulation. I have taken my MV-40 U230 as high as 2 GHz at .925V. The GPU issue I had was caused by excessive voltage and FSB changes within a short time during testing. GPU now stays at 500 Mhz.

In regular use I find that I prefer setting the FSB to 230 for 1840 MHz. This allows better performance than stock while still being stable at .85v. Temperatures max out around stock at 63C while overclocked to 2 Ghz, temps max at 56C at 1.84 Ghz.

I rarely donate to shareware projects, however Abo was great to work with and seems to really appreciate those who use his software. I suggest you donate if you have the means.

 

Having just purchased a 230 from Argos UK, all in all the netbook is a nice piece of kit. But! What the hell is up with the ralink wifi card? It's range is abysmal. Even sat right next to the router it can't fill all the bars. In the lounge I am lucky to get a single bar and get regular drop outs. Every other wireless thing in the house doesn't suffer with this, so I know it's not a router issue. Even my phone connects to the router where the 230 can't.

So... I cracked open the case (after knowing everything else is fine and really am not bothered by the warrenty sticker) took out the wifi card, reseated, updated the drivers and got a small improvement but it is still aweful. Has anyone successfully replaced the wireless card? and if so, what with?

Thanks

 

defraguk, just make sure that you change the "power saving mode" to CAM instead on Max_PSP in the adapter configuration and you should be right.

 

Made hardly any difference. In the lounge I still get 1 bar of signal. Right next to the router I still cannot get full signal. So there has to be something wrong with the card or the antenna wiring. No other wireless devices have this problem. I think it's time to look at rerooting the antennas... or jsut replace the card.

 

Thanks for all the information in this thread. I recently bought MSI Wind u230-40US version.

I updated my hard drive to 64GB SSD. I installed 64 Bit Windows 7, and I updated my ram with the 2x2GB G-Skill ram.

I've used SetFSB and RMClock to overclock my CPU.

1.) Now what about the GPU? How do I overclock that? All I've done is follow the guides in this forum, but I have no knowledge of the GPU. Could someone post a small guide of whats the best way to overclock that and with what settings.

 

right solved the problem. bought a Dell DW1520 802.11n half size card from ebay. Straight swop, got the win7 x64 drivers off Dells website and lo and behold, full signal in the lounge! Everything works. Only cost £15.

 

Is it true that if I overclock the CPU to 2.0ghz the RAM also clocks to 400mzh? That's what my CPU-Z is showing and I think I saw a big difference in gaming.

 

Firstly, huge thanks to glsracer!
Without his/her contribution to the SetFSB project we would all be stuck at the 1.6Ghz CPU and 320Mhz RAM speeds.
glsracer deserves all the reps the U230 owners in this thread can give.

defraguk: Good to hear. Looks like you just had a badly manufactured RAlink card and that the issue was not with the antennas.

ejvgold (and to all who still read this thread): The most important part is the HT link / FSB speed. use CPU-Z to check this. For example using the settings below my CPU at 1.28GHz (4.0 multiplier) will play games better than stock speed U230 at 1.6GHz CPU + GPU overclock + memory overclock.

* Warning! The following is not for the faint hearted *

I am currently running my u230 at 1.92Ghz CPU with a FSB of 320Mhz and HT Link at 1280Mhz using SetFSB. (setfsb.exe -w00 -i40.0 -s320.0 -cg[RTM880T-794] -q)
To do this I am using the x6.0 CPU multiplier and the default 0.95V on the CPU. (use the latest A64Info to do this)
On my AMD L335 the x4.5, x5.0 and x5.5 multipliers are not stable at the FSB of 320Mhz. Only x4.0 and x6.0.
My memory (2 x Transcend JM800SQU-2G) is now at 384Mhz (when x6.0 is used), but this was not good enough so I changed the SPD to 4-4-4-10 using SPDtool and Memset.
My GPU is "folding@home stable" at 626Mhz using the latest AMD GPU Clock Tool.

Temps and Benchmarks in next post...

 

After reading this lengthy thread, I managed to do my first OC and Undervolting on MSI U230, equipped with the dual core AMD Neo X2 L335 and 4GB of RAM.

The tools I was using are RM CPU Clock 2.35.0, SetFSB 2.3.158.124, AMD GPU Clock Tool 0.9.26, AMD Overdrive 3.1, and CrystalMark 2004R3.

The netbook is running 32bit Win 7 Ultimate with Catalyst 10.11.

And the following screenshot shows the stock speed, with the left most image were taken from the first couple of pages of this thread, showed the benchmark score during pre-release of U230.


Now, after reading the post earlier from teknophyle, I've decided to do exactly as his config, overclocked the GPU to 626mhz with increment of 100mhz, and set the FSB command line syntax on the logon script, both on battery and Powernow disabled from BIOS, and disabled PowerPlay from Catalyst Control Center.

The only problem with this setup is the instability on my netbook when I restart and power cord plugged. It seems the FSB was too high if the netbook uses power cord from the beginning.


After deciding 15% of increase should be sufficient, I reconfig setFSB to increase up to 230mhz, and RMClock to 0.95v at 8x, 0.85v at 4x, and the rest at 0.9v. This is the result.


That was on battery, and this is the result when plugged.



So at the end, I managed to get similar performance both on battery and 240v, fully charged battery gave reading around 3.5 hours, with PowerNow enabled on BIOS, and good enough performance to watch 1080p on youtube.

 

I have an MSI U230-400US, after tweaking the startup and uninstalling some of the bloatware (including a face recognition something); the webcam stopped working. Im using skype and the program cannot detect the webcam anymore. I tried the yahoo messenger with the same result. From the time I bought this laptop the webcam was working without a hitch. I just restore to point a month before but the same result. By the way the FN +F6 is on but nothing still.

Can anyone please direct me how to fix this problem!!

Thanks in advance.

 

ricksoh: Keep in mind that the U230 BIOS retains the FSB speed on a reboot or even BSOD reset, but will change the multiple back to defaults. On my setup I only use the Standby/Hibernate or Shutdown as these are the only options that reset the FSB and multiplier safely. If I reboot when overclocked the multiplier is set to x8.0 and the FSB is still 320MHz, therefore CPU = 2560Mhz and the machine hangs.

COMPnewbie: If you have already tried reinstalling the webcam driver (bison) and still no luck then you may need to remove the battery and ac for a minute and then try again.

Ok so here are the first set of bench pics.







And finally the temps when running 3DMark06
The U230 has hardware protection built-in to turn off when CPU goes above ~100'C (Believe me, I've been there many times).



I would highly recommend using CoreTemp's Overheat Protection when doing any overclocking.

 

I ordered myself U230-086US off NewEgg last week it should be here Tuesday. I'm wondering if anyone has had luck with Ubuntu working out of the box?

 

I dual boot W7 and Ubuntu on my wee U230 - works like a dream.

 

First off teknophyle thanks for the reps! I'm glad my efforts have helped more than just myself.

I haven't been back here in a while since I've been very happy with the performance I've had after overclocking the CPU. I have yet to overclock the GPU, however with recent changes in the quantity of Flash content on youtube and hulu I've been thinking about a little boost.

teknophyle, your configuration is quite interesting. I haven't tried running anything other than a 6x multiplier for power save at 1.2 Ghz and 8x for performance at between 1.6 and 2.0 Ghz and .87 to .95v. This puts my hyperthread link at a maximum of 1 Ghz and 400 Mhz(x2) for the RAM.

I may try a few different settings now that the Fusion dual core laptops are starting to come out. At present the e-350 is no faster stock than my single core at 1.9 Ghz according to several CPU benchmarks I've seen. Your 1.92 Ghz dual should put them to shame. So i'll start taking my u230 closer to the edge when faster versions of the Fusion series arrive later this year.

To add to Big Dan's question: I too dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7. Video performance was slow under Ubuntu until I located a tweaked AMD 3200 series driver. Unfortunately I haven't gone to the effort of configuring the Ubuntu world's version of SetFSB so battery performance is quite poor under Ubuntu. Currently I use this OS only when I have my laptop connected to external power.