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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.
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.
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
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.