Anyone recommend me a good laptop?

Purusha said:
One worrying feature is the 400Mhz FSB. Considering desktops are now up at the 1GHz+ mark, isn't this going to impede things a bit?
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I *think* that's what Dual-channel DDR RAM is all about...

Centrino 2 (next year) bumps this to 533MHz apparently. Maybe this is worth waiting for (for me at least)?
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Don't think it's going to make much of an appreciable difference to be honest - you'll get a definite bump, but don't know if it'll up the number of concurrent VSTs or audio channels.

J.
 
chek online at would u belive toys r us, they got killer fast lappys in for just under a grand, best i found for the money is deffo the models in aldi and here(toys r us) :Smile3: just waiting for any possible jan sales b 4 i part with me doller :Wink3:
 
Colin, how's your laptop????
 
i'm getting excited cause i'll finally have a laptop in the new year..... :jump:

i've seen a few that look good but i've got some questions that i hope some of you guys could help out with...

How does a Pentium M Centrino compare with a P4 and Athlon 64
I've been looking at Pentium M 1.7 Ghz with 1/2Ghz of RAM

what would be a comparable spec P4 and Athlon 64 (ie. what speed P4 or Athlon 64 would a need to get to achieve the same performance)

I've found a few (what i think) are decent laptops in my price range, with 12 months interest free credit on www.laptopsdirect.co.uk. I'm now deciding which processor would give me the best performance for the £s.

Looking forward to hearing your comments.

Morgan
 
morganism said:
How does a Pentium M Centrino compare with a P4 and Athlon 64
I've been looking at Pentium M 1.7 Ghz with 1/2Ghz of RAM

what would be a comparable spec P4 and Athlon 64 (ie. what speed P4 or Athlon 64 would a need to get to achieve the same performance)
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Right - to get some perspective:

It may be obvious to those who've seen me post regularly, but I'm a bit of an AMD fanboy. In the desktop market, in terms of bang for buck, they've got Intel pretty much cornered and Intel are desperately throwing money at trying to find a solution after the P4 Prescott turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. Last I checked they're trying to re-work the Pentium-M (Centrino CPU) design for desktop use - no idea how successful they've been yet.

Having said that, AMD haven't got things quite right in the mobile zone yet, so I'd hold off for a while.

So - Pentium-M vs. Pentium 4-M. To get the terminology right, Centrino is actually a group of chips, whereas the P4 is a processor only. The Centrino chipset basically consists of the Pentium-M processor and the chipset to drive it (Intel 855 IIRC), which includes built-in wireless and other nice mobile shenanigans. If you want those features in a P4-M laptop, they either need to have a chipset which does the job (rare), or you'll have to buy a PCMCIA card to do it.

When it comes to actual performance, the Centrino Pentium-M proc was designed for mobile use from the ground up - which means lower power consumption, larger caches, and more accurate branch prediction than the P4. In English, that means that a lower clocked Pentium-M will best a higher-clocked P4, as well as sucking less juice to do so. Ironically, Intel's marketing has shot them in the foot there, because they spent so long hammering on about GHz that many don't realise that a 1.7GHz Pentium-M will handily spank a 2.2GHz P4, and will hold it's own against a 2.6GHz P4 as well.

To combat this, Intel came up with an equally incomprehensible numbering system - the top of the range Pentium M is the 755 (2GHz), followed by the 745 (1.8GHz), the 735 (1.7Ghz) and so on.

Get the highest spec you can afford, even if that means sacrificing wireless performance for a better processor. Also remember that as rule of thumb, Pentium-M's perform as well as a P4 clocked 1.5 times faster.

Hope that helps.

J.
 
just been in Dixons in Colchester & they had a Sony vaio 3.06ghz laptop with multiformat DVD RW, 512 mb DDR ram, 15.4" X-black tft screen (which is the nxt generation of tft screens and is so much clearer thean a normal tft) 40gb har5d drive, 128mb radion graphics card, tv out, Windows XP, 56k modem, 3 usb & 1 firewire connections, lithium ion battery for an amazing £999!!!! think I might get 1 to replace the dell laptop I have at the minute.
 
Bear in mind that a 15.4" screen will actually have a lower resolution than a 15.1" screen, and your 40GB HDD will almost certainly be of the slow 5300 rpm variety... also check whether your USB ports are USB 1.1 or USB 2.
 
Also bear in mind that a P4-M 3.06Ghz will be slower than the later 3GHz iteration due to the front-side bus speed. It'll also be a shade slower than a 2GHz Pentium-M (Centrino).

J.
 
hey guys...... L-Day is fast approaching (Laptop day :Grin: )

i've been looking at Novatech laptops...... THe company seem alright if you wanna buy a hardrive or other components but, i'm really looking at one of their own laptops.

1.8ghz centrino jobby with a gig of ram and 80gb hardrive....

I reckon it won't be as high a standard as other better known laptop manufacturers but for the price (less than £1100) it seems alright.

Does anyone have any experience of novatech laptops (i'm not expecting many of you will)? I want to know what the physical build quality is like. I'm going to be using it for live sets and don't want something really "plastic-y" that will fall apart etc.

HELP cause i really want this laptop

here's the link so if you wanna be really helpful you can have a look

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/NBsextra.html?NNB-247

morgan
 
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