1.8ghz w/ 2MB L2 Centrino (8600) vs 2.8ghz P4 (9100)

i would love to see real world comparison benchmarks of these 2 as i am torn between them as well....although i am leaning towards the longer battery life, i have this nagging voice in the back of my head asking if the pentium M will still be able to handle things 3yrs from now vs the 9100 3yrs from now?

The mobility radeon 9600 is very good in games, just not as good as the 9700. I mean i play HALO in highest settings on my 9000! So the 9600 would be fine. The 1.8GHZ is about as good as the 2.8GHZ(really), with the exception of the HT. And yes dothan is simply the 1.8-2.0GHZ 400FSB Names. The 8600 uses 400FSB CPU's so it's using a dothan. the 1.7GHZ> is not a dothan.

coodkidd:

If you search on the Dell General forum here, or the official Dell Community forum, you will see that many I8600 users with Pentium M 1.7GHz (Banias) and ATI 9600 report excellent gaming performance.

Dothan is the code name for the new version of Pentium M introduced on May 10. Compared to the previous Banias version which topped at 1.7GHz, it runs at up to 2.0GHz, and has twice as much L2 cache memory. According to the few benchmarks and comparisons available so far, Pentium M 745 (Dothan 1.8GHz) shouldn't be worse than Pentium 4 2.8GHz.

Further, for most (if not all) current games, the CPU speed doesn't matter too much, since the GPU is the real bottle-neck.

As for GPU-s, ATI 9700 is of course faster than 9600, but their differences aren't dramatic (since essentially 9700 is just an overclocked version of 9600).

In effect, if you care for battery life and weight, I would recommend I8600 with P-M 1.8GHz over I9100 with P4 2.8GHz, unless other users of I8600/I9100 provide more convincing arguments.


arctic-k20:

In three years from now, all you can expect from I8600/I9100 is that they will still be adequate for web surfing, text processing, etc.; just forget about gaming. Even for the near future, we still don't know what GPU upgrades will be offerred. Both machines should be adequate for at least a year.

One is mobile and one is a tank. Give that battery some use and it will last ya an hour or so if your lucky and the 8600 has vbery good battery life. The speed isn't worth the weight or the massive look and frankly, there are posted specs on the net that show the old 1.7 running with a 2.6 desktop so the 1.8 is going to give that 2.8 a run for it's money.
I just ordered 2 of the M60 2.0 fully loaded and if you look at this link, it will run with a 3.2 desktop.

http://www.specbench.org/gpc/opc.dat...ight-perf.html