AMD laptops? Should i buy one over a P3 powered one?

[gregshin]

Debating on AMD or P3 powered notebook...must be able to run Photoshop....help me choose....

 

[Derango]

AMD isn't quite there yet with a mobile CPU, in power consumption as well as heat. At the current time, I would go for one of the P3-M notebooks. Very nice chip. Some AMD zealots will tell you that AMD is the only way to go. I say to them: Sure, go AMD, if you're going to have it plugged into the wall most of the time! The P3-M based notebooks tend to last longer on battery power than their AMD counterparts.

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

<< AMD isn't quite there yet with a mobile CPU, in power consumption as well as heat. At the current time, I would go for one of the P3-M notebooks. Very nice chip. Some AMD zealots will tell you that AMD is the only way to go. I say to them: Sure, go AMD, if you're going to have it plugged into the wall most of the time! The P3-M based notebooks tend to last longer on battery power than their AMD counterparts. >>



Exactly, the PIII-M's .13 um process makes it use less juice than AMD's .18 um Athlon 4's. I say go for the PIII-M for increased battery life.

-Ice

 

[Haribo]

<< Should i buy one over a P3 powered one? >>


No.

 

[hans007]

the p3 may warm your leg, the amd might just burn it

 

[Athlon4all]

They aren't bad, but considering the fact that the P3-M gets better battery life, and that it with it's 512k L2 Cache, comes awful close to the Athlon 4's performance (may even beat it considering that the A4 is 100fsb and it's using SDRAM not DDR), I'd say go the P3-M

 

[AU Tiger]

I can vouch for the battery issues with an AMD processor. I can get an hour and half on my Vaio with stock battery. I haven't invested in an additional battery yet because I am never too far from an electrical outlet.

 

[apoppin]

I've been really satisfied with my Inspiron 4100's P3-866M. I have a 8 cell and back-up 4 cell battery and was able to watch TWO DVDs on the 5 hour flight.

 

[bbarnes]

Probably would be best to go with the P3 (I do like AMD better), but in this situation I think its pretty obvious Intel probably has them beat.

 

[aircooled]

I agree.. I'm an AMD guy at home. But as far as laptops go, I prefer the PIIIm. My thinkpad will give me approx. 2 1/2 hours without using the CDROM/DVD.

 

[Mingon]

<< AMD isn't quite there yet with a mobile CPU, in power consumption as well as heat >>



OK time to clear up some facts, the amd 1.2 ghz on 0.18um produces 25 watts of heat the 0.13um Piii m produces 22 watts of heat. The amd is comparable to a PIII for battery life as they both use 1.4vcore BUT the amd has far superior voltage / speed control via powernow than the singular mode of speedstep. as for performance they are very close and currently the 1.3ghz amd (1.5xp) is the quickest. If its for running Photoshop the amd will win easily as its FPU is the strongest.

 

[hans007]

first off most AMD laptops are stripped down pieces of crap value notebooks. they usually have thecrappiest batteries too. Secondly i'd think the p3-M would usually beat it because the p3-M has better cache, better cache bus, better bus etc. and also most athlon notebooks come with really crappy chipsets.

 

[human2k]

If you run the athlon notebook head to head with a pIIIm notebook, the pIIIm will come surely come out victorious cuz while running the benchmarks in about an hour the athlons battery will dead.

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Go for the P3-M. It's using the .13um process, drawing less power and creating less heat. That's exactly what you want in a laptop. In another two months or so the Thoroughbred will be the better choice. It too will be .13um and draw less power, but it will have a 266FSB and clocked much higher than the P3-M can reach on the older Pentium core. The P4 will be able to compete better with Thoroughbred but even at .13um it's still much larger than the Thoroughbred and as such has greater power requirements. For now though, P3 is the way to go.

 

[Mingon]

Amd consumption from here 25 watts @1.2 ghz (1.4 vcore)
Intel from here 22watts @1.2ghz
Arstestbench results are worth looking at they show the IPC of the athlon 4 / athlon mp / athlon xp is better than the pIII-m (or server version). As for batterylife a the fact that the Athlon can clock down to 500 mhz should alow it to stay competitive

 

[Daovonnaex]

AMD notebooks only have a marginal performance advantage at the cost of quite a bit of battery life. Therefore, I recommend the PIII-M. If you want real performance, get a P4 notebook (P4, not P4-M--the P4-M is nothing special).

 

[AppleTalking]

Yeah, those numbers may be correct, but the fact of the matter is that most AMD laptops come equipped with POS batteries. Most of the laptops that have good graphics cards (GeForce2 Go, Radeon Mobility 7500, etc.) and long-lived batteries come with the Intel P3-M processor. In my opinion, if you're looking for a machine to do a lot of CPU-intensive tasks, you're better off with a desktop. Laptops just aren't there yet in terms of hard drive speeds, battery life, and expandibility.

That said, most of the better quality laptops (e.g. Dell, Toshiba, and IBM) are built around PIII-M processors. I'd take a better-built P3 laptop over a cheaper quality Athlon notebook any day, even if the Athlon trounced the PIII in the benchmarks. As I said before, laptops are not for running a lot of CPU intensive tasks.

Nick