Centrino v's Mobile P4

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Tan

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Hi

I have been tasked with getting my Sister-in-Law a new laptop.

My shortlist is an Sony Vaio PCG-K315S or Z or a Toshiba Satellite M30-106. All three of these are around the £1000 mark. (3.0 GHz, 512 RAM and 40 or 60 GB HD)

Whilst looking in John Lewis today they had a repaired HP Pavilion ZT3000 with a Centrino 1.5MHz chip, 512 Ram & 60Gb HD for £699. With one years warranty, upgradeable to 3 yrs for £99 or 5 yrs for £169. Its slim and light weight and is also widescreen.

Here is my question.... whats the diff between the Centrino and the Mobile chip? Why are the mobiles twice as many GHz as the Centrino's, ie. 3.0 v's 1.5 in this case. I hope this makes sense.

Regards

Tan
 
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Shouldnt look at the clock speeds TBH,

IIRC, Centrinos have better power management skills, and themselfs use less power (useful on a laptop) etc
 
The machine will spend most of its life sat on a desk, i just thought that the deal at JL was great. To be honest if it were else where i would have been very scepticle.

The sales guy said if it gives trouble later then they will replace it with a new one.
 
According to the intel site the following types of processors are available:

http://www.intel.com/products/notebook/processors/index.htm

Intel® Pentium® M Processor
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor supporting Hyper-Threading Technology
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor
Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor-M
Intel® Celeron® M Processor
Mobile Intel® Celeron® Processor

The high speed CPU machines (max 3.3ghz) are normally "desktop replacement" boxes, and use quite a bit of power - looking at around 1.5-3 hours on most of the near 3 ghz machines. Not normally designed to be run from battery for long periods, but rather taken from place to place with a power supply.

The Centrino machines (top one, max 2.1ghz) have slower clock speeds, but are more efficient and have better battery life and power saving features along with wireless functionality. More recent centrinos have 2MB cache (called/nicknames the "Dothan"), and are faster again.

As an comparison: My new machine is a Pentium M 1.5ghz Centrino, and benchmarks faster than my Pentium 4 2.4B desktop machine! It also returns 5 hours of battery life from one charge.

Hope this helps.

Centrino details here:

http://www.intel.com/products/notebook/centrino/index.htm
 
Hi,
I went through all this over the weekend, I bought a new laptop and a desktop machine. I went P4 for both. The Centrino is a chipset rather than a CPU it incorporates the Pentium M and a wireless chip and as Scott says the Dothian cache to double the throughput. It is turned towards low power consumption while holding some performance. At the end of the day a high end Centrino will compete with a 3mghz P4 but the cost is higher for the Centrino. So if its not going on the move you might as well go P4 and save a few hundred pounds. I bought a toshiba SP20 -801 from micro anvica...
3.2 P4
512 Ram
60 gb hard disk
DVD +/-burner (Its not dual layer though :( ) But it is a removable drive so I will upgrade it at some point :)
on board wifi
17 inch widescreen
= £1300 with a "Free" Ipod mini :bannana: centrinos were about £1500 +


Best regards,

Peter

Peter
 
Nice machine - how big is the power supply for it?

I got my Centrino for £699 at staples, and it works really well, altough the keyboard isn't so exciting to use.
 
I went through a similar decision a few months ago when I replaced my previous laptop with a Toshiba Satellite P4. TBH, it is probably better value to go for one of the P4 machines for the application you are looking at (ie, mainly desktop based). My way of thinking was that unless you are purely interested in power consumption and the advantage of built in wireless, you can buy a better featured/performing machine (P4) for less money.

I had a similar budget as yours, but ended up buying the Toshiba (P4 2.8, 512MB DDR, 40GB HD, DVD-R/RW drive, 15" TFT, plus all the usual (firewire, modem, LAN, USB, S-Video etc etc) plus win XP and Works) for under £760 from a major supplier.

You obviously get a 1-year warranty as standard, and for the price I paid (3 months ago!) I will happily upgrade to a new machine in about 9 months time! :D

If after this time you really do need something that the current machine doesn't offer (eg extended battery life, bigger screen etc) then you can make a more informed decision over what to buy next. :)

HTH,

Cheers,

Will
 
scotth_uk said:
Nice machine - how big is the power supply for it?

I got my Centrino for £699 at staples, and it works really well, altough the keyboard isn't so exciting to use.

That is a very good price! what make is it?

as for pack size, about the size of a small semi in Chelmsford ! :D The 17" tosh is not what I would call portable by any standards, but I given that I always drive to my clients sites, I am not so bothered about weight and battery life.

picture here :)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v404/spud747/DSCF0034.jpg
 
Mine is an Acer - 1.5ghz, 40gb drive, xp home, 15" screen, -/+ DVD R and RW burner, 256mb RAM, 54mb wireless, Radeon 9700 graphics (fast!), etc. I added another 256mb of ram for £70 and it goes like a rocket.
 
hp= horrible puter

had 4(four) :mad: hp pavilion they all packed up on me in the first week they just got so slow they gave up......+....the latest batch had Toshiba disc drives and where troublesome according to hp and got so hot the disc just would not run :eek:from start up to desktop took 8 mins after a week
 
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just noticed this thread dont know if your sorted now or not il explain.

theres no reason that a p4 would be faster than the centrino its just the chip they are useing and the machine you can get centrinos the same speed as the p4 chips.

ok laptop cpu chipset etc same thing really does same thing.

you get these
p4
p4m (p4 mobile)
centrino( is a celeron)
celeron
amd

ok not many diffrences id not go for a amd for a start they are cheap but do the job for a short time.

keep clear of the p4 as its a battery drainer the p4 mobile is better on the battery as its a p4 mobile more advanced celeron is about the same as the p4 mobile and the centrino is even better apparently a wonderfull cpu to get the most from your battery life.

also bare in mind when getting laptops the graphics will always be the let down as moveis and games allways need better and better and laptops have only just got to the point where you can change graphics cards and thats only some and expensive if its just to do office work etc you dont need a good graphics card if for games you will need a good graphics card laptops arnt very good for games as it is.

lastly from what ive seen id say a dell is the best laptop as its very well built ushally good spec for the price and is very upgradeable. you can get a laptop that will do office work and browse net for 399 currently and a good spec laptop for 599 beats sony big time they are very expensive and dont seem to be much for the money. toshiba seem to hit the middle of the ranges well priced but not great spec like dells hi spec laptop

you can also get brands like madalion mesh acer and others that are cheap compared to the others ushally use cheaper compolents and use amd as the cpu and arnt worth as much.

currently a 2.6 cpu should be fast enough for anything at all i mean 2ghz is fast enough for a laptop laptops dont need the power as they arnt gameing machines. 512mb of ram is plenty so dont be put of buy shops say add this makes a diffrence theres barely any advantages unless your running a lot of programs and once i mean a lot. 60gb hd is huge for a laptop i mean you mite only have 1 game installed adverage game is no more than 1gb adverage office documents youd need a few hundred to fill 1gb

large amount of info there probs make things more confuseing but may also help.

for priceing your best to look around well people sell them second hand for as much as they are new. :crazy:
 
Tan said:
Here is my question.... whats the diff between the Centrino and the Mobile chip?

I personally would avoid the Centrino unless long battery life is important. Basically these are lower speed processors to save battery life with added WIFI.

I have a P4 2.8 laptop and a P4 1.8 laptop and both of them out perform my old works laptop which was a Centrino 1.2. Just my 2 cents worth.
 
Not sure I'd agree with that these days, as there is more cache on the current Centrinos. As I may have mentioned earlier, my Centrino 1.5 outperforms my 2.4 desktop P4 with 533FSB.
 
scotth_uk said:
Not sure I'd agree with that these days, as there is more cache on the current Centrinos. As I may have mentioned earlier, my Centrino 1.5 outperforms my 2.4 desktop P4 with 533FSB.

I guess it depends on what you are trying to do with it. In general I just found the Centrino to be a bit sluggish. I use my P4's for running Cubase (music software) for use on stage in my band. I tried this with the Centrino and it just could not match the performance of the P4. I guess for general office use, you'll never notice a difference.
 
Scotts correct on this, Centrino is a better technology than P4's for laptops - faster and cooler too.
 
theres no point being fooled thinking you need a fast p4 in laptop dont be silly laugh at the people in the shops when they say you do they drain your battery and a 1.7mhz centrino is as good as a 2.7ghz p4 so centrino is much better i dont have a laptop but have 7 pcs in this house made 2 machines up a p4 2.6 and a celeron 2.6 guess whats best the celeron it will happily be clocked up to 2.9 people have got 3.6 which is another 1000ghz over its speed with very little extra cooling celeron will run faster pentium are horrid to clock a extra 50ghz let alone 100.

www.ebuyer.co.uk
and
www.dabs.co.uk
are much cheaper than pc world and commet and second hand ads in your local papers etc.

you can also get laptops made by a firm called alien originaly from the states they are the only laptops that are designed intend to be used for games.

but if you only need office work internet etc perhaps moveis then you could get a toshiba for 400quid that would be a celeron or centrino 2.2 - 2.8 and about a 40gb hd you will probs get a cd writter as standard as now dvdrs are about no one buys cdroms anymore or even dvdroms all pcs are fitted with cdwritters they only cost a extra few quid and it gives so many more uses same with laptops now. and id say 16mb graphics is now the bottom range 32 is also common now i mean you can get 64 128 and 256 but 32 is plenty unless you want to play games now for a few releases you must have 256 in pcs laptops are always on the thought you will want atleast double what you need in a pc if it is going to run a game. so i dout youd get a game like far cry or doom 3 etc to work on a laptop or quality would be extremely poor.

sorry i wrote so much once computers is mentioned i know a lot of the answers before march this year all i used to do when i wasnt working was piss about with computers until i got me driveing lisence now i aint trapped in the house.
 
nfs_tgb said:
theres no point being fooled thinking you need a fast p4 in laptop dont be silly laugh at the people in the shops when they say you do

You can laugh, but the rest of us who need our machines to have raw speed for certain applications, will keep using the P4. Remember, all the Pentium M variants like the Centrino systems vary the clock speed while on battery to save power. This is fine for MSOffice, but no good when your software needs power.

For general office use, yes, a Centrino system will be fine.

they drain your battery

True because P4s are not optimized for portable use. We need to plug them in anyway for long periods of use. In my case the batteries will last long enough as I only would need to run on batteries under full processor load for just over an hour.

and a 1.7mhz centrino is as good as a 2.7ghz p4 so centrino is much better

Not when you run on batteries. Then the speed falls.

i dont have a laptop but have 7 pcs in this house made 2 machines up a p4 2.6 and a celeron 2.6 guess whats best the celeron

But what are you running on these Celeron machines? Office? Internet Explorer?

And of course, please don't confuse Celeron with Centrino. Centrino is not a processor it's just a Pentium M bundled with WIFI.

celeron or centrino 2.2 - 2.8

As far as I know, there are no Centrino (Pentium M) at 2.8 much less 2.2 Ghz. A similar speed Celeron will NOT out perform a true P4.
 

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