Centrino vs. Moblie Pentium 4 vs. Pentium

[NaiDanac]

I'm currently in the market for a laptop (never bought one before). I'm unsure as to which chip to go for:
Centrino, Mobile Pentium, Pentium, Athlon, etc.

I will need it for simple MSOFFICE use, as well as internet, playing media, etc...

I don't see my self developing on it, or for CAD drawings, etc.

I am concerned about a few things:
Battery life
Heat
Noise
Weight

I realize that there's a great diff in price between Centrino, and let's say a Celeron chip, but is it worth it????

Your advice is much appreciated

NaiDanac

 

[jrbarnett]

NaiDanc

A centrino laptop means that it has a mobile Pentium 4 processor with 1Mb second level cache, an Intel motherboard chipset and an Intel wireless ethernet adapter installed. Because of the extra cache, the centrino laptops are not comparable with P4 desktops clock speed for clock speed, for example:
My centrino 1.6GHz laptop is roughly on par with an Athlon 3000+ desktop PC in CPU performance terms (Seti) which runs at 2.2GHz.
Graphics chip will only matter if you want to play games or do 3D graphics - so go for ATI Mobility Radeon or Nvidia Geforce Go range chipset. Otherwise, anything is OK for office use.

John

 

[arbytech]

NaiDanac,

Basically a laptop with the Centrino identification means that it has the newer Pentium M processor (no number associations like 2 or 3 or 4), a chipset to work with that processor and Intel's wireless (WiFi) networking altogether. This package will allow you to have long battery life and less heat. Like jrbarnett stated above the clock speeds of the Pentium M are not comparable to that of a Pentium 4 or 4M. The actual performance of the laptop will be very good because the processor can better adapt to how much processing power you need at any given time. This link has a nice graph showing that despite the slower clock speeds the performance is the same.

http://www.upenn.edu/computing/provider/docs/centrinoprovider.html

A Pentium 4M will work second best, but it will drain your battery and give off a bit of heat (mine does). A 4M is just a Pentium 4 but it can throttle back a little bit to try and save battery life.

A Pentium 4 laptop has the same processor that you would find in a desktop. It will eat up your battery and give off noticable amounts of heat.

 

[skiflyer]

Just to clarify... Pentium M's are not Pentium 4's with extra cache. They are a separate chip, most closely compared to a Pentium 3.

The extra cache is a wonderful thing, but the reason for the clock speeds not matching up directly is all about instruction sets. The differing instruction sets mean that graphs like the one itswork linked to are good guidelines, but your mileage may vary. Most of those charts are done for business apps, spreadsheets, databases, word processing etc. The comparison is not quite as valid for games, if that's of interest to you... it is still a significant boost, just not as significant.

By all means, get hung up on the Pentium M chip, it's trully a beautiful piece of engineering, but don't get hung up on the Centrino labelling, it's a marketing campaign. The centrino package is a great one (own one myself), but there are definitely better performing network cards you can stuff in a laptop.

One thing you didn't mention you care about, but I'll throw in anyway... Pentium M based notebooks will tend to be both lighter and thinner. And as itswork stated, will provide the best battery life out there. The IBM T41 with the extended life battery and the modular battery in the CD bay gets around 10 hours for example.

 

[NaiDanac]

256 ram or 512 ram???

 

[jrbarnett]

Get 512Mb, more future proof whatever you run.

John

 

[ceh4702]

When purchasing a laptop computer you want to get everything you will ever need for them when you purchase them, because they are very hard to upgrade. They are proprietary in nature so they are not normally user upgradable. Sometimes having a Serial Port for presentations is what you need and many laptops do not have that port which are currently being produced. Having a PCMCIA interface is also a good thing. It allows external add-on devices like an external hard drive or a modem to be plugged in.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[skiflyer]

One comment about the RAM... check around for prices, alot of the laptop vendors are overpriced. I recently bought an IBM, and for what it would have cost me to upgrade to 512 Megs I was able to go to BestBuy and upgrade to 768 Megs instead. And yes I still got quality RAM with a lifetime warranty from a reputable manufacturer.

-Rob

 

[dinduboy14]

i still dont understand...I know of Centrino, Pentium 4 and Pentium 4Mobile. Hence the difference between Centrino and Pentium 4Mobile is just the inbuilt Intel 855 chipset???!!!