Help me in selecting 64 bit AMD laptop...

[spfdz]

Alright I'm currently looking into getting a laptop. I want to grab a 64bit athlon laptop. I'm just curious, is there any kind of specific processor I should be looking for? Or should be watching out for or something I should know about the performance?

How does a 2.0ghz athlon 64 bit compare to a 3.0 p4? etc.. I'm just interested in knowing a bit of information regarding 64 bit notebooks.

 

[mmebane]

You should avoid the Pentium 4s unless you just want a desktop replacement that's easy to lug around. Their battery life is much worse than the Athlon-based systems.

EDIT: I misread the FP. D'oh.

 

[beyoku]

question is do you want to game or not? also how much you have to spend?
will you carry it everyday? have you ever owned a laptop?

 

[ShellGuy]

The new Turion are the low wattage 64 bit chips. The main question you have to ask is what do you plan on doing with it? If you are wanting to game with it then you will need to wait for a bit till some other models come out and hence bring down the price of the lappys. But if price isn't a prb 4 u then get something along the lines of a Acer Ferrari.


Will G.

 

[spfdz]

I'm not looking for a gaming machine. Just need a machine to do some surfing the net, photoshopping, watching and burning movies etc..


So basically Turion is the exact same as a regular athlon but lower voltage correct?

There's no performance difference really.

 

[imported_Woody]

Originally posted by: spfdz
I'm not looking for a gaming machine. Just need a machine to do some surfing the net, photoshopping, watching and burning movies etc..

Maybe you should consider a P4 machine. I have an Athlon64 notebook and am very happy with it. Picked it (eMachines M6805) up a year and a half ago and it performs on par with today's fastest machines....a real bargain at the time.

The Athlon 64 is better for gaming but the P4 is better for video and photo work and the kinds of things you indicated you like to use it for. The 600 series are 64-bit enabled. The major drawback of the P4 is power consumption and heat....tranlates to poor battery performance in a laptop.

Basically AMD has some very good mobile processors but are limited by the motherboards available for laptops. There are no socket 939 laptop systems and the existing 754 while they hold their own do not stand up to their desktop equivelants. Right now if you are looking for a low power consumption high performance mobile processor the Pentium M is probably the best you can get. The only major drawback is lack of 64 bit support and relatively poor performance on video or photo editing batch jobs. The Pentium M is as good as the Pentium 4 for office applications and gaming if not better.

 

[fbrdphreak]

Originally posted by: WoodyBasically AMD has some very good mobile processors but are limited by the motherboards available for laptops. There are no socket 939 laptop systems and the existing 754 while they hold their own do not stand up to their desktop equivelants. Right now if you are looking for a low power consumption high performance mobile processor the Pentium M is probably the best you can get. The only major drawback is lack of 64 bit support and relatively poor performance on video or photo editing batch jobs. The Pentium M is as good as the Pentium 4 for office applications and gaming if not better.

Actually there are Socket 939 laptops, all DTR. The current "mobile" offering from AMD is the Turion 64 CPU and it IS socket 754 based. S939 doesn't offer THAT much improvement anyway. Turion has the improved memory controller and SSE3 support(?), just no dual channel memory support.

Pentium M is a great chip, but the Athlons have better number crunching capabilities. For your uses I would recommend a Turion 64-based system: it offers good performance and good battery life, all at a decent price. If you don't care so much about batt life and portability, the gateway 7510GX has an A64 3700+ 1GB RAM 15.4" WXGA for $1200 on sale @ Best Buy. It also has X600 graphics, making it one of the best gaming notebooks for the money.

And yes, Turion is just a power optimized Mobile A64. It does run at lower clock speeds overall, but performs very comparably to a full A64. Depending how portable you want it, you could go with an HP nx6125 (15" Turion business notebook; 3 year warranty, fingerprint scanner, and bluetooth standard) or L2000 (14" widescreen Lance Armstrong special addition, well loaded for around $1K), or a Compaq V2000 (same as L2000, just not "special addition"). HP makes some good notebooks :thumbsup:

Give us more specific requirements and we'll get you squared away

 

[imported_Woody]

Yeah don't get me wrong, the A64 is a great mobile CPU. The main issue I have is the lack of PCIe support in mobiles, the dual channel you can live without. These two limitations make the A64 currently not great for mobile gaming. But you said you don't care much about that anyway.

You can get a nice Athlon 64 based system with an AGP 8X Radeon 9700 or 9800 mobility for nice all round use and it will still play some nice games if you ever care for that.

The power now feature is nice too. When my A64 3000 mobile kicks down to 800MHz on battery I barely can tell the difference for casual use.

But if you don't care about battery life and want raw horsepower you can get either a P4 6xx series or a very high end Athlon64 like 3500 or higher. The P4 will still suck down more juice.