PIII-M or P4 M?

  • Thread starter Thread starter MightyOne
  • Start date Start date
M

MightyOne

New member
Hey hey,
I'm in the market for a laptop. One of the applications I will be doing w/a laptop and an external 7200rpm drive is record some tunes (I know, I know. Naysayers, your point has already been noted).

I can get a Gateway Solo 9550 w/PIII 1.2 and 512 RAM for @$1850. I think they are marking this computer down to make way for the P4.
There are some P4 laptops out now with more expected soon. However, these will probably exceed the above Gateway price by @ $400.

Do you think the P4 will greatly enhance the recording and general computing experience. I don't play games or edit video.

I don't want to kick myself in a couple of months.

Thanks.
 
Hey MightyOne -

I'll try to help you out with this. I'm actually not all that big into laptops, but hopefully you'll find some info you can use anyway.

In my opinion, the P4 would not boost the overall speed of the laptop enough to warrant the extra $400 spent - especially if the P4 isn't faster than 1.8 GHz. I apologize - the P4-M is so new, I really haven't read anything about it, so I don't know what MHz flavors it comes in. If it's slower than 1.8 GHz, you're almost throwing your money away.

I'm looking at the Gateway laptop lines right now, and I don't see anything with a P4... one word of caution, though. A couple of laptop makers actually broke down and produced laptop machines with full desktop P4s. I would not buy one of those, as the power consumption is just too great.

Either way, that big 15-inch screen is going to be the biggest power draw on your system (I don't know if this is a concern for you), but a PIII would definitely draw less power than a P4.

To put things in perspective, digital recording can actually be done with as little as a PII or PII-based PPGA Celeron. And a lot of the overall feeling of speed or responsiveness in your computer actually doesn't come from the CPU at all, because the CPU isn't the bottleneck. It's other things like hard drive speed, system bus width, or the operating system. Up until recently, I was running a computer with a PPGA Celeron 466 MHz, overclocked to 525 MHz, and Windows 98SE. One of my friends just got an OEM computer with a 900 MHz Celeron and Windows XP, and I was amazed at how much slower her computer seemed in comparison to mine. The difference is often in the configuration, and being careful not to bog your machine down with unnecessary memory-resident software.

Anyway, check this out:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010919/index.html

It's a review of the PIII-Tualatin/1.26GHz/512KB Cache, with benchmarks that pit it against the P4 1.8 GHz. Although benchmarks are only synthetic ways to measure speed, it should give you a good idea of what gains you could expect with a P4 (very little).

I think that extra $400 would be better spent finding a high quality audio solution that you like.
 
Hey,
Thanks for the reply, Eurythmic. You gave me some knowledge I can really use in the near future.

I'm actually going to hold off for a month or two before I buy a computer. Laptop or Desktop, PIII(M)? or P4(M)?, Athlon?-- I should settle some of my indecisions before I buy.

And by the way at this point the P4Ms are 1.6 GHz and 1.7 GHz

I appreciate your reply.

MR
 
Hey, no problem. Good luck with your purchase. You know the cardinal rule... the longer you wait, the more you'll get for your money. :) But you picked a good time to start thinking about buying. Other than that P4-M, I haven't read about any rumors of upcoming cuts. Everything's basically stagnant right now.
 
Back
Top