Thread: Low Power, low heat, amazingly powerful chip

Originally Posted by antirush

For anyone out there who is looking for a more powerful alternative to the via ITX chips, there is now quite a good choice. The Pentium M, intel's mobile chip, now has desktop micro-atx boards available. It consums about 28 watts at full load, runs at around 65 degrees without a fan. And performs about half a step below any of the top level desktop chips (athlon 64 FX Pentium 4 Prescott). It's faster than a 3.6ghz prescott and an fx55 in most game benchmarks. At 2.3 ghz.

i bought my laptop when they introduced pentium m and i could really tell a big difference i can keep my laptop powered longer almost twice.

Originally Posted by antirush

If only I had money...

same problem here...

Originally Posted by mushin

Yeah, the Pentium M is a very nice chip. It's nice to see these mobile chips becoming available on the desktop, I think the mobile Athlon is available too.

Yep, and they are cheap. But they aren't always detected on desktop boards

I'm typing this from my Pentium M lappy right now. I agree, these chips rock and I've already started looking for a good Pentium M small form factor alternative for in-car use. When I looked a few weeks ago at this, the only alternative (still not available) was going to be $1000+ US for a board and chip. That's a bit too expensive for my tastes!

Here is the info on the board:
i855GMEm-LFS

Here is where you can buy the board:
store.myaopen.com

MicroATX form factor, 4X AGP slot, 3PCI slots, 2 DDR333 (up to 2GB), supports Dothan or Banias CPUs, ATA, SATA, DUAL GLan, integrated 5.1, 6xUSB 2.0, firewire, S/PDIF on board...

and that's the short list.. all for just $267 USD (not including the CPU of course).