Digital Home Thoughts: MSI Wind BIOS Update Provides CPU Overclocking

"We've long since known that MSI was a fan of overclocking. After all, just about every last one of its gaming notebooks come with one-button OC'ing courtesy of the Turbo Drive Engine technology. Now, it seems that the company is giving the spoils once reserved for the Crysis crowd to those with netbooks, or more specifically, the Wind. The freshly released (and absolutely official) v1.09 BIOS update enables simple overclocking by mashing Fn+F10, giving users the ability to push things 8%, 15% or 24% beyond their normally specified limits. Electric Feel over at ElectricVagabond has found that the update provides up to a 30% boost in performance..."

While it might seem strange to overclock a netbook, the fact that it's so easy and can be done from within Windows means that it's highly practical to crank the CPU up when you're using an application that takes more grunt. I haven't loaded up Photoshop Elements or Lightroom on my MSI Wind, so I doubt I'll be overclocking it, but it's nice to know that I can do so if I wish. I wonder what it does to the battery life though? Heck, I'd prefer to underclock the CPU once I was in Word 2007 typing up a document if it meant saving some battery life.