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

Compatibility and Stability Testing

When we first received the S271, the system worked fine in all of our tests, although as we mentioned it felt a bit sluggish due to the amount of memory. The first order of business was to upgrade the memory, and after determining that the system came with one 512MB DDR2-667 SO-DIMM from Transcend with 5-5-5-15 timings, we figured we would just pick up another generic SO-DIMM online. We went to Newegg and picked what seemed to be a reasonable choice, a budget module from Gigaram. Unfortunately, it appears that the MSI notebook was totally incompatible with this particular memory. Lesson learned: if you want to upgrade your memory in a laptop, you probably shouldn't get the cheapest memory available.

We contacted Corsair and Crucial to see about getting some sample memory after the bad experience with generic RAM, and they were happy to oblige us. One interesting note is that when we mentioned our memory incompatibility problems to MSI, they told us that the laptop didn't support DDR2-667 memory. This is somewhat interesting, considering that's what the laptop had when it arrived. Corsair sent us both a 1GB (2x512MB) kit and 2GB (2x1024MB) kit of DDR2-667 memory. The laptop did manage to POST with both memory kits, and initially we thought everything was fine. Then we started trying to run benchmarks....

After having zero issues with the included 512MB of Transcend memory, we rapidly discovered that we had severe instability problems once we upgraded to 2x512MB of Corsair memory. The laptop does seem to run a little warm when being fully stress tested, so that might seem like a potential cause, but oddly enough that's not when we had the most problems. The biggest problems seemed to occur when the laptop was idle or at least not under heavy load, and frequently it would just lock up and we would have to remove the battery and unplug the system in order to reboot. After the incompatibility with the Gigaram module, we figured there might be a problem with memory compatibility and the initial BIOS. The original BIOS was also an engineering version with a lot of debugging options and the ability to manually specify timings, although even with many attempts at tweaking the timings and memory speed we were still unable to run the system with full stability using the Corsair RAM.

At this point, we did what any sensible person would do: we updated the BIOS to the latest release. The new v1.17 BIOS release removed a bunch of the options from the CMOS setup screens; for example we no longer had the ability to specify memory speed or timings, and the debugging options were gone. So far so good, and at first the system did seem more stable. As we began to run more benchmarks, however, we eventually determined the laptop was still unstable with this memory configuration.

We contacted MSI about our problems, and eventually they gave us a new test BIOS. This test BIOS doesn't appear to be publicly available right now, but the major change seems to be that support for DDR2-667 memory is removed. Our Corsair memory is now running at DDR2-533 speeds, at 5-4-4 timings. While that is slower than the memory is supposed to run, after all of the stability issues we had encountered we were ready to take anything that would keep the laptop from crashing. We are happy to report that ever since the last BIOS upgrade the MSI S271 has been running perfectly stable in all of our tests.

Late in our testing, we also got some memory from Crucial, only this time we had them send us both DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 modules. We then went back to the latest public BIOS as of this writing. We were particularly interested in determining whether the problem was with the Corsair memory or if it was the laptop's support of DDR2-667. We started with the 1GB DDR2-533 modules, which booted at 4-4-4 timings. During a limited amount of benchmarking and testing, the Crucial memory appears to be fully stable without the beta BIOS, at least when using DDR2-533 SO-DIMMs. Having verified this, we moved on to the 2x512MB DDR2-667 Crucial memory, which has so far been running stable at 5-5-5 timings.

So what exactly is to blame for the poor memory compatibility of the S271 laptop? Given that an updated BIOS was at least able to address the issues we experienced when using the Corsair DDR2-667 memory, it seems likely that further BIOS improvements could solve the problems. If you're interested in getting one of these laptops, the best course of action for now appears to be getting DDR2-533 memory, preferably from one of the more well-known memory manufacturers. Of course, Corsair is a very well-known memory manufacturer, which is why it was particularly surprising that their memory didn't work properly with the MSI notebook.

In terms of performance, the 2GB Corsair kits was slightly slower than the Crucial 2GB kit, due to the slightly better timings which were used with the Crucial memory. The Corsair RAM should have been able to use the same 4-4-4 timings at DDR2-533, but the "compatible" BIOS revision didn't set the timings appropriately according to the SPD values, and there was no option in the BIOS to manually set timings.

In the end, performance and stability was excellent once we had the proper memory/BIOS installed, and we didn't experience any further issues. However, it would have been much better if we could have used any of the memory modules without the need to jump through hoops. This article was delayed for well over a month as we tried to determine why exactly our laptop was having so many problems, and once again we have discovered the importance of having an optimal BIOS.