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Desktop Pentium M Motherboard Review
Babstar writes "Discussed numerous times on Slashdot, the quiet PC is the holy grail for many, and one step in the right direction could be using a Pentium M (designed for notebooks) in a desktop machine. Here's a review of a desktop Pentium M motherboard. Surprisingly it's also a great game machine."
A bit too little, a bit too late for Intel.
For much much cheaper, you could get an AMD motherbaord that supports Cool 'n Quiet: the CPU is underclocked to 800Mhz for things like web surfing and watching DVD's. There's also an option to have all the fan stop if the case is cool enough.
For a list of supported motherbaords clickhere
For the price of the Pentium M CPU alone, you could get a faster motherboard, a mid range AMD 64 bit COU and maybe some ram.
Intel currently has two major consumer-level processor architectures on the market, "Prescott" and "Dothan". The Prescott processor core is the basis of Intel's Pentium 4, Xeon. and Celeron processors, replacing Intel's previous mainstream processor core known as "Northwood". Intel's Prescott architecture was truly designed with clock speed scaling in mind, as the chip will scale up to 3.8 GHz, which will no doubt make for some incredibly fast processors. Unfortunately, in order to make these CPU's clock so high, the efficiency of the chip had to be compromised. Intel's "Prescott" processor core runs hotter, consumes more power, and has the worst performance per clock cycle of any modern Intel processor core.
These factors have made Intel's "Prescott" based Pentium 4, Xeon, and Celeron processors less attractive to the enthusiast market compared to previous Intel processor products. While the mass markets are largely unaffected by Intel's Prescott core shortcomings, a larger amount of the population is slowly coming around to the fact that the Pentium 4 is not on the right track lately. With Intel seemingly misfiring on their latest processor families, the enthusiast crowds are discovering new and better options, including AMD's Athlon64 processor lineup.
Intel, however, does have an ace up their sleeve, that being their other major processor architecture, "Dothan". Dothan is an architecture which was designed from the ground up to consume as little power and produce as little heat as possible, and was originally designed strictly for the mobile markets. When Dothan processors started to hit the market, people quickly realized how efficient this core was in addition to the Pentium 4. In addition, performance of the chip was surprisingly good, considering the fairly low clock speeds at which Intel has presented this processor lineup with. Our tests in the past have shown that a top of the line Pentium-M processor can perform on par with the fastest Pentium 4 and Athlon64 processors in terms of raw CPU power, which is extremely exciting considering the limited feature set of the Dothan core architecture in comparison to today's desktop processors.
Until now though, the Pentium-M platform has been hindered by its attachment to the notebook sector. Since the Pentium-M runs on an alternate processor socket (Socket-479m) which is electrically incompatible with every Intel desktop motherboard on the market, we have not been able to see what the Pentium-M processor is truly capable of in a workstation or gaming configuration. While there always has been some demand for Pentium-M motherboards for the desktop, there was not enough of an urge to turn this demand into more than niche appeal.
Today though, we finally get to see how the Pentium-M platform can compete with the big boys, thanks to AOpen's new Pentium-M desktop motherboard. The AOpen i855GMEm-LFS is the first of its kind to bring the Socket-479 mobile socket to a desktop environment, an extremely exciting product for those looking for a high-performance, low noise system. Let's get to it.
Pros and Cons of the Pentium-M
The Pentium-M processor has several key factors which are very attractive and others which will be unappealing to some. Before we get stated on looking at the actual hardware which will power our Pentium-M desktop setup, let's look at the pros and cons of this architecture.
Pro - Efficient Architecture - Intel's "Dothan" architecture is one of the most efficient designs on the market today, allowing for exceptional performance with fairly low clock speeds. Even at a peak clock speed of 2.0 GHz (2.1 GHz models have been announced, but aren't shipping yet), the Dothan processor can match raw performance levels of Pentium 4/Athlon64 chips at much higher clock rates. The surprising fact here is that the Dothan architecture is rumored to be based on a derivative of Intel's Pentium III processor architecture, although that fact has never been confirmed by anyone at Intel to our knowledge.
The Dothan processor pipe
GamePC has a rather good collection of benchmarks, shame they got slashdotted already.
My favorite was the Xeon vs Opteron gameing benchmarks. Now if someone just had a dual SLI PCI-Express and Dual Opteron board, life would be good.
the shuttle website describes it as the following:
"The Integrated Cooling Engine uses convection (liquid) cooling to transfer heat away from the processor and other critical system components. Copper tubing, coated in nickel and filled with distilled water provides the conduit through which heat is radiated out of the chassis."
Its my understanding that all shuttles use ICE*
Cheers.
* I could be wrong....
Printer-friendly (1-page) and coralized link.
Good thing to mention: they addressed their inline images relatively so they get fetched through the cache.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
I just got a super-quet machine. It's an HP 8200 workstation. Dual Xeons, tons of power and it's so quiet I literally have to look at the light to see if it's actually on.
The surprising thing is that it's conventionally cooled. The side panels seem to be a bit thicker and they invested a little bit extra for higher quality fans, but nothing too exotic. This thing really proves you can have a quiet machine and not have to go to alternative processors or liquid cooling. I wish more vendors took a hint from this design.
http://www.kontronuk.com/products/mbmitx886lcdm.ht ml
kontron have already done it, and it has both s-ata and agp
I'm running on one of these setups now. I just liked the hardware so much that I threw down the cash and took it home with me.
- Chris / GamePC
Here's how that was supposed to read:
There are multiple versions of the Athlon 64 mobile, so you have to be very careful to pick the right one, but... There is a 2800+ 1.2V part, that has a total power dissipation (TPD) of 35W. With AMD's ratings, that means that fully utilized (saying running something compute-bound like SETI @home), this part has a power consumption of 35W. (I believe Intel publishes average numbers, not max, although this is something I've read and not researched myself.) Will "Cool and Quiet" turned on the power consumption at low speed is supposedly 15W. And there is supposedly a Sempron mobile coming out with a TPD of 25W.
Having said all of that, finding any retailers that carry the low power parts has been difficult. (Finding the higher power DTR parts has not - newegg carries those, for example.) Have they been pulled from the market, or are they not for the retail channel, or what? Anyone know what gives?
You are not correct in that they are quiet. It was only within the last year that Shuttle made some design changes to make them quiet. I have a 2 year old XPC that is not quiet & it was made before they switched to a different powersupply manufacturer. My PS has a 40mm fan that buzzes & the 80mm main fan even with variable speed temp control is simply too loud. If you are interested in the small form factor XPC line, then get a new one like the one in the review & not an older one which you might get dirt cheap.
Long cables are great, but before anyone thinks of rushing out to look for 100-ft cables, USB lengths max out at around 15 feet; similarly, I've found that video signals seem to degrade when using anything longer than a 15 foot cable, much like using a cheap KVM switch, or a KVM with over-long cables.
Depending on where/how you live, an alternative to crawlspaces is making use of the adjoining room. Putting an electrical-socket-sized hole in the wall works well for running the necessary cables through to the other side. Closets, I've found, are always on the wrong side of room. And if you have a lot of equipment, you'll need to ventilate the closet.
CPU is the least of my worries.
I didn't think that was just a rumor--I thought the story was that some Israeli branch of Intel developed the Pentium-M based on the Pentium III architecture (which was much more efficient clock-per-clock than the P4, which was designed more for marketing-driven clock speed), and now Intel is seeing the error of its ways and giving up on the super-clocked, super-long-pipeline approach and ditching the P4 architecture and adopting AMDs non-GHz-based numbering schemes as well as, umm, their 64-bit instruction set. Oops.
Or not so surprisingly. Pentium M CPUs have a much larger bus (IIRC) than comparable CPUs, and thus can perform many more instructions per second per clock cycle than a similarly clocked Pentium 4 or Athlon XP (and I believe even the A64, with 32 bit code).
There's really nothing in the x86 implimentation right now which compares with the P-M, IMO. Price might be a little high, but performance per clock, power consumption, size, noise, and overall performance is pretty much tops.
I'd say the only thing preventing Intel from switching to P-M based chips at this point is a reluctance to ditch the research investment for their P4 and other chips (and likely the warehouses full of chips, I'd wager). As soon as the profit isn't worth the wait, we'll see a Pentium-M derived desktop model, I'd imagine - quickly followed by a laptop model that has even better power consumption, etc. than the current P-M.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Anyone got a clue why Pentium M are far more costly than P4s? Something to do with (sold units) volume?
They are better maybe? They overclock like hell - I am typing this to you on a Pentium M system (DFI 855GME-MGF motherboard) and a Pentium M 755 CPU running at 2.7GHz - it is faster for my code (a JIT engine, but think "gcc" here) than any other CPU there is, bar none. It sails past an FX-55 and a 3.4GHz P4.
And want to know what's scary? It does all that using (I estimate) 25W or so of electricity. Less than my video card. I have a PC Power+Cooling "Silencer 410" in the box and it runs COLD. I never knew quite how much heat power supplies generated until I used this motherboard+CPU! The CPU heatsink gets warm (but not hot), and it is _tiny_ the heatsink is literally 6 or 8mm high, and about 4.5cm square. There is a 40x40mm fan on top of it (10mm high), which I cannot hear over the case fan (which is an ultra-quiet, low RPM 8cm model). The box is basically silent: any outside noise whatsoever masks it completely.
I should stop ranting, but I'll end with this: this is one of the more expensive computers I've ever purchased, but it is by far the best.
So yes, they're good. Maybe that's why Pentium M CPUs are far more expensive. (The other reason is that this CPU is meant for the notebook world, far more expensive items selling in a market without the same degree of cutthroat/cheap taiwanese crap/DIY "competition" that the desktop market has. As a result, somewhat fatter margins on CPUs can go relatively unnoticed, so Intel makes some money. Good on them.)
What _I_ want to know is why Transmeta CPUs are so damn expensive. To get a basic transmeta CPU + motherboard is even MORE expensive than my Pentium 755 + DFI motherboard combination (sure, that uses 1/2 the power, but it gives you about 1/3 the performance..)
Or a Pentium M... Those can run fanless, on this board (a sufficiently large P4 heatsink can do it w/o a fan), and on DFI's board (don't OC, but a northbridge heatsink can do it on the slower ones). At 600MHz, it can even run HEATSINK-LESS.