pentium m - Page 3

Well I would expect about 2 hours on the 5680 with dual batteries, even less with 1. Hehe, 30 minutes for the 8890 with Raid. Now that would really suck.

Well, if you want a 17" screen, you don't have many options....

You just have to weigh screen vs battery life vs performance and figure out what you want.

You are aware, aren't you, that the 4760 screen is 1440x900 (halfway between WXGA and WSXGA) while the 5680 offers a wide-viewing-angle UXGA (1600x1200). That gives the 4760 1.3 Megapixels of desktop space compared to 1.92 Megapixels for the UXGA - or 48% more desktop space on the 5680. Photoshop objects tend to be a fixed number of pixels in width, you'll fit more of them on the 1600-pixel-wide UXGA on the 5680 than on the 1440-pixel-wide screen of the 4760.

Just a thought.

-phubar

Wide pixel UXGA on the 5680. I just looked at some threads with pics of the 5670. They are wide angle but how will this wide pixel look. I would like to see because I don't know if 1600x1200 will be an eyestrain on me because i just set my monitor to that and boy did it hurt my eyes, but thats probably frlom the low 60Hz refresh rate. But how will this wide pixel 5680 differ from a regular 15" LCD with UXGA. will this 5680 be long and similar looking to the 4670. Anyhoo

If that is the case, I might as well get a 15" laptop with a wide pixel UXGA. In the sense, it will provide me with better better battery life. Only one thing though, I noticed the 333Mhz memory in the 4760. Woulnd't that benefit me in photoshop? And I had asked this in another thread but for fast and long lasting performance, do I need to get a HT chip? I am currently on a Dell with a 1.33Mhz and Photoshop elements loads fast..Could be faster if I had 512MB of memory). e2g

Edit:
If I have a 1.33Ghz desktop system right now and If I get..hmm..maybe a 1.4Ghz or 1.5Ghz Centrino Laptop, by how much of a performance boost would I obtain, In photoshop elements. Note: My desktop has only 256MB of RAM.
Just curious. I am a lil skeptical about hard drives in other non sager notebooks as they don't spin at 7200RPM and I know that is a major performance boost right there.

I think you misunderstood me. When I said 1600-pixel-wide, I simpy meant that the UXGA screen is 1600 physical pixels wide - there are 1600 columns of physical pixels between the left edge of the screen and the right edge. It still has a normal 4:3 aspect ratio, just like all other UXGA screens, and is still 15" diagonal.

But if UXGA (1600x1200) strains your eyes, it's not worth going up to anyways. Note that some CRT monitors have trouble projecting images in really fine detail (like 1600x1200) so I'd reccomend trying to get a look at a UXGA LCD in native resoluton.

4760 memory is DDR333, yes. 5680 memory is DDR400 with dual-channel architecture, or 2*400/333 = 2.4 times as fast. The next version of the 4760 (estimated to arrive around October) should also support dual-channel DDR400 memory.

Processor speed is not directly indicative of performance, as discussed earlier in this thread, so i'd need to know what type of proc your desktop machine has to know what the performance difference is likely to be. Photoshop is most likely multithreaded, so HT will give you a big boost right there. A P-M at 1.4 or 1.5 GHz with a significant RAM increase should outperform your desktop by a good margin.

Many vendors are offering the 7200 rpm hard drive now, you should be able to get one in any high-end machine.

Alright, and yeah. I misunderstood. The 4760, in October (my b-day) will that come with a longer battery life or you don't know. Alot of vendors have 7200RPM notebooks huh? well, do you know any centrino notebooks with that in it? I noticed in Adam's review of the 4760, the battery looked like those packaged in an RC car. If thats the case, would it be possible to find an alternatice battery, same dimensions with a longer bettery life? Probably not. I think I will just go with the 4760 and if I see something better before or aroun October, I will get it. Maybe I should go to CompUSA and get a feel on how big this 4760 but checkin out the 17" Powerbook, huh?
e2g

Edit: Anyone?

The 4760 in October will probably use the same chassis and battery as the current one. The new stuff draws more power, so battery life will be slightly worse. I would not try creating a custom battery for a laptop - current and voltage specifications have to be very exact.

I badlymisspoke about getting the 7200 rpm hard drive. To be more precise:
- a lot of the small companies specializing in high-performance computing offer them now.
- a lot of vendors are selling the drive itself. You can buy one here and install it yourself in any machine that supports the ATA-6 or Ultra ATA/100 interface (two different names for the same interface). You may be able to get a better price than $345 for the drive, I didn't look too hard.


I did a quick check of the major brand name players. Most of their top-end models support ATA-6, so you can put in the hard drive yourself. Unfortunately:

Sony, Sharp, HP/Compaq, and, surprisingly, IBM, seem to feel that mentioning hard drive speeds would only confuse their poor technically unsavvy customers. So they don't even mention the fact that hard drives have speeds on their websites. This may be true for the typical customers of the first three, but I expected better from IBM - who, after all, manufacture the 7200 rpm drive.

Dell does that group one worse. Click on an explanation of hard drives for their Inspiron models, and they say, "Desktop hard drives spin at 7200 or 5400 rpm, laptop hard drives spin at 4200 rpm." - flagrantly incomplete and misleading information. And of course, all their Inspirons only come with 4200 rpm drives. What a scam!

However, Dell does offer 5400 rpm drives on its Latitude notebooks, and you can get the 7200 rpm drive in their new M60 workstation. The M60 is also a Centrino machine and has been discussed extensively in this forum (do a search to find threads).

Acer and Ahston Digital support Ultra ATA/100 on most of their machines, and seem to ship them to retailers without hard drives, allowing the retainer to build-to-order (BTO) the machine. You can probably find a retailer who installs the 7200 rpm drive if you look hard enough.

When comparing the 17" powerbook to the 4760, remember that the 4760 is a half-inch deeper, 70% thicker, and nearly twice as heavy (9+ lbs as oposed to 5.5 lbs).

-phubar

Not to get OT here, but that is definetly not the case. The voltage of the battery must be within the range of the voltage regulator, and the "current" is not an issue: current is the amount of power the laptop uses at a given time. What you are more than likely thinking of is capacity (Amp*hours). That number is simply capacity, and nothing more! If you built a new battery with the same voltage and a larger capacity, you would simply have a battery that runs longer than the default!

Current is an issue, don't get me wrong, you don't want to overload the battery. However a battery will give out unlimited current if it has to, however it gets A) very hot, and B) is damaging to the battery. The capacity of the battery is usually rated in the maximum current the battery can supply for 1 hours time before dropping below a safe voltage level. So a 5A/hr battery can supply 5Amps of current to a device for 1 hour, or 1Amp of current for 5 hours.

Of course, what you can't do is use a smaller battery, because the charge current would be too great, however this is not a problem with a larger battery.

And twice as expensive. Get a powerbook with a gig of RAM, and you're paying $4000 for a laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive. The Sager equivalent is about $2000. Sager doesn't force me to buy a DVD writer I wouldn't use, and lets me buy a 7200 RPM hard drive.

You'd also have to start paying for the Mac version of the Service Pack. When OS 10.3 comes out, users of 10.2 have to pay to upgrade. I like getting all the SP's for free.

$2000 extra just isn't worth having a laptop that glows in the dark and can't play my favorite video games.

Oh, I almost forgot. A one button mouse!!! What are the Apple engineers smoking when they sit around every once in a while and say "should our next model have a 2 button mouse? Nah, 2 buttons are completely useless - we don't need that". Microsoft makes mice with 5 buttons (standard 2, scroll wheel as a middle, and 2 thumb buttons), and Apple still can't get it through their thick heads that 1 button isn't enough.

Not quite as bad is the wasted space that both Apple and Toshiba decided not to make a numeric keypad...

Are there any benchmarks that show the actual speed to be at (or close to) the potential twice as fast, for dual-channel architecture?

I read one benchmark saying its only useful in shared video ram environments, where half the time, the game itself will reside on one of the chips, and the video ram will reside on the other, so you can write/read from both at the exact same time. It didn't seem like a very reliable source, so when it said that was the only advantage, I wasn't very trusting.

I would think, in the ordinary example (dedicated video RAM) the chance of the processor needing to write or read from both banks at the same time would be very rare.

Unless something is changed to force memory to be split between the 2 chips. For example, every even byte is on one chip, every odd byte is on the other, guaranteeing a split between the two for any program. I don't know if that change would have to be hardware or software... if its software, it would have to be in the OS, and I don't think this was available when Windows XP came out. Which means either Microsoft knew about the upcoming technology, and wrote in support for it, or they'd have to issue a patch for it to work. I haven't heard about either.

Maybe this is related to HT? That the processor is (sort of) executing 2 threads at the same time, and if both happen to want memory read at the same time, and those 2 locaitons happen to be on different chips, then it can do it at the same time?

plus this laptop with only a 1.3 ghz centrino almost blows away my 2.4 desktop, centrino's are better than the desktops imo, they are as fast and are cooler and quiet

I am lost as to which Centrino laptop your talking about. Please guide me.

I also take issue with something "almost blowing something away."

It reminds me of an old Simpsons quote (talking about football, when he says, "Yeah, maybe that's why we beat you in football almost half the time."

The dual channel architecture is implemented completely in hardware in the memory control module. How it actually works, Intel isn't saying, but they claim (reasonably) that it provides RAM I/O speeds up to double that of single channel.

One implementation of dual-channel would have been to stripe the memory accross the two channels just like using RAID-0 with two hard drives. That would almost guarantee doubled throughput. However, that is not, apparently, what Intel is doing, so I couldn't tell you what the actual performance implications are.

-phubar

why cant they just give the desktop p4 a bigger cache?

Probably die size. Memory takes space on the chip, adding 512K of memory would require increasing the chip size, which requires retooling the manufacturing process, and changing the chipset card layouts...


-phubar