Why are laptops slower?

[600Burger]

Not even a year ago i helped my sister find a middel of the road, word prossesor/internet laptop for around $1000. It was a 2.4 GHz Hp with a smallish HD and enough memory (i can't recall exactlly, but it doesn't really matter). Now i'm helping my girlfriend pick one and every laptop i look at is 1.4 - 1.8 GHz for about $1200. Whats happend in the past year? Does Pentium M/Centrino make up for the differance?


-Burg

 

[Justin216]

I think we need to make a sticky for this...

Yes, a Pentium M/Centrino is much faster than the 1.4-1.8 you mentioned...GHZ does not equal speed anymore, even Intel has dropped the GHZ numbering system on the newest Desktop chips...those Centrinos are typically very high performance machines with excellent battery life....Centrinos are currently the way to go for a smaller notebook for those operations....

 

[600Burger]

YES!!! Please sticky this! Alot of friends of mine were also clueless to this fact. Also, how can you compare the new centrinos to the older chips?

 

[spanky]

intel stopped with the mhz/ghz war... thus the lower numbers. despite the lower numbers, thhose pentium m chips kick major arse.

see here and here

 

[jvarszegi]

Originally posted by: 600Burger
YES!!! Please sticky this! Alot of friends of mine were also clueless to this fact. Also, how can you compare the new centrinos to the older chips?

welcome back raccoon

 

[halfadder]

Pentium-M on a chipset from the Centrino family is the way to go. Zippy fast, but be sure to get a recent CPU model, Pentium-M has been out for awhile now, and the earliest speeds are a little slow by today's standards.

Another ***HUGE*** notebook performance issue is the graphics. Unless you're only going to be using MS Word, then be sure to get one with a real GPU, it will free up your CPU and RAM bandwidth for more important work. Even a Radeon 9200 Mobility will greatly improve the overall performance. If you want to play games, a Radeon 9700 Mobility is perfect for UT2004, Halo, WoW. Even Doom3 and HL2 can be played on a 9700 Mobility, but you'll have to dial back the resolution and/or the quality settings.

 

[imported_umbra]

pentium m's are to P4's as athlons are to p4's pentium M's have a different architecture than pentium 4's they have less stages which means the data gets where it's going faster. I don't know if this is right but I believe they have like 11 stages not sure. While presscotts have around 30 and northwoods around 20. The core is more efficient in getting the data faster which makes it run faster and better. They also have a huge amount of cache which helps in absolutely everything. While some p4's have 256-512-1mb cache mobile's have a minum of 512 for celerons 1mb for banias pentium m's and 1 mb for the dothan celeron and the dothan core has 2mb l2 that why the exteme edition intels hace 2 mb l3 cache for more perfomance. think I answered that question

 

[DragonMasterAlex]

Don't forget hard drives, guys! Many laptops ship with 4200 RPM drives as compared to a desktop's 7200-10,000 RPM drives! If you can find one, get a laptop with a fast hard drive to help aid in the performance

Jason

 

[gujuguy007]

the whole tech industry is kind of slow (picking up slowly)...but really most higher processors will have heating issues. heat is bad for most laptops because eventually it will cause problems in the longrun (like lockups and other hardware malfunctions) since you have a really narrow space to stick in your hard drive, ram, video card, cd-rom, etc whereas you can have adequate cooling with a desktop with proper fans. pentium M or amd M processors are the way to go for now since they use less power and provide speeds more than adequate for a user.

 

[PeeluckyDuckee]

The Pentium M CPU is a very capable chip with desirable laptop characteristics of low power consumption and heat dissipation. I have the T42 laying on my lap in bed and it never gets hot, luke warm at best. Whereas my old Inspiron 8100 with P3-M would get very hot and raise my body temperature to the point where I'm sweating. And that's with a blanket between me and the laptop base.

Granted though, on battery alone, the cpu automatically clocks down to 600mhz for the Pentium M. Since I use it to surf the net it's more than adequate.

 

[hopejr]

my P4-M 2.2GHz used to fry my crown jewels, so I decided to only use it on table tops Sometimes it smelt like burning plastic.