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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."
One thing I've noticed is the more fans your computer has the more often you end up needing to replace components. I've had 2 high-end video cards fry themselves due to the bearings in the fans wearing out.
Now I run a box practically devoid of fans and it's been running great for 4 years & counting.
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
Buy a shuttle.
I have two, one which is a power workstation, AMD64, Radeon 9800 Pro, 2 gigs ram, sata disks and still is very quiet.
They are both stacked on each other and are very sexy units.....uses liquid cooling mechanisms for cooling and are competitively priced.
Google for the website to slowdown the slashdot tidelwave.
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.
I've been using a pentium M laptop with a docking station at home for months now. Its been silent heaven. You do take a speed hit with keeping the chip in "battery performance mode" in order to keep the fans off 99.9% of the time, but to avoid the high pitch noise of my desktop, its sooooo worth it.
What is striking about such a setup is you can actually forget your computer is even there when watching a movie on TV or reading a book in the same room.
As far as I care, the ultimate sound test is turning off a monitor and seeing if you can tell a computer is on.
Silence is golden.
If this is accurate. VIA's may have trouble with their Epia series of motherboards. I've got an M10000 and I'm looking to upgrade soon.
That is, only if the prices drop on both motherboard and CPU.
It seems that the industry focus is about to change from increasing Mhz (essentially useless for most non-gamers non-content producing desktop users) to decreasing noise / power consumption. I think its a sound strategy, as its the only way I can see my parents upgrading from their (noisy as hell) 1 Ghz AMD Thunderbird.
Anyone got a clue why Pentium M are far more costly than P4s? Something to do with (sold units) volume?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
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
Yea, low-tech ... but pretty darn effective ... and I rarely need access to the CD/DVD drive and/or box itself, so it works for me.
Having said that, I look forward to the Pentium-M's ... 100+ Watts of power for the 3+ GHz Intel CPU's is semi-ridiculous ... and I gotta believe that if the thermal load from that can be removed, it will create savings in other areas. BTW, if you DO want your PC to be a space heater in the coming winter months, fire up Google Compute.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Does that make the iMac the holy grail?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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?
Given the trend and push for low consumption, hence quieter PCs, I'm optimistic that problems like this will be a thing of the past
Join the TWIT army now!
Just buy a new cooler. Cheap 80x80mm ones go for like 15 bucks, and they perform just as well as your current one. In most systems, either the graphics card of the PSU/case fans ought to be the noisiest, I think.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
In Spring of 2000, my LeadTek GeForce 256 came with a fan, a noisy little bugger that failed in less than a year. Here's a picture . So did most of the other flavors (Asus, Guillemot, etc.), as a fan was specified on the nVidia reference design. I ended up taking the fan off, and attaching a large passive heatsink. End of problem.
CPU is the least of my worries.
An iPod could handle a slashdotting given enough bandwidth, as long as it was serving static pages. Dynamically generated content (such as ASP) is what burns most slashdotted servers.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Wait a minute - this is a review posted on a MANUFACTURER'S site. GamePC sells PCs, including, surprise, a Pentium M gaming system.
I second that notion. My primary computer at home is a powermac g5. Of course most of the time I'm using it for web surfing, email, instant messaging, managing digital music, and it is silent. I often make home dvds on it, write design docs and presentations, and occasionally do some C++ or Java programming for work. Some of the programming or home dvds can get the fans to sound occasionally, but it is rare enough to always surprise me. Of course maybe I just can't hear the g5 because of the blaring sound of P4 across the room...
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
I had a bit of buyer's remorse waiting for it to get here even though I spent less on it than I did when I build my last desktop. I was worried a laptop couldn't take the place of a desktop that I could build much more cheaply but I was truely amazed. It compares favorably in every way with desktops in performance while giving me the sort of portability that in Intel based systems was previously unheard of. I get over 4 hours to a battery on this thing and a well under 10 pound travel weight when I want to take it with me. I remember when Apple had a huge lead in the battery life game with the G3/G4 vs the Mobile P3/P4 and that lead has completely eroded. Intel actually made a processor that uses less power without sacrificing much in the way of performance to get it.
I have moved completely to this laptop for all of my computing needs and it has the best of everything with seemingly no comprimise. I know that technology has progressed in the desktop scene as well but compared to the kind of freedom that we have been given in mobility with the increased performance and battery life coupled with wireless networking in the sort of package offered in the new Centrino notebook they don't compare. These notebooks are the sort of progress that changes the way we use a computer and work while being soo stark and beautiful a contrast and change that it truly feels that we have joined 21st century computing in a revolutionary feeling desktops just don't give. I for one will never by another desktop after a couple months with this laptop and suggest that rather than looking to the Pentium M as a desktop chip, as there are far cheaper for the purpose, you should take the plunge and buy a notebook with one and experience the quiet and the performance along with the portability and form factor change that can cut the wires and set you free.
The old G3 iMacs, fanless wonders they are, do indeed run very quiet. Bravo to Apple for creating a near-silent computer (only hard drive noise).
And, in fact, if you want a TRULY silent computer, you can take one of those old fanless G3 iMacs and remove the hard drive. Then you boot it off of an OS X Server using NetBoot. Voila! A computer with literally zero moving parts. TRUE silent computing. Not even the whirr of a hard drive.