Originally posted by: Lithan
Originally posted by: dexvx
Originally posted by: Lithan
Actully a DECENT 865 board (p4p800se) is $95 new. a ct479 is $50 and a 730 is $200. That comes out to about $350 buying all the parts new. Dothan is not a value chip. It's fun and performs well, price/perf is about on par with a 3200+ venice. BUT as soon as you pick up a 7800gt or better for your athlon, you've got to drop $200 on a mobo to import a pci-e model to keep dothan competitive. In the end, 740+p4gd1+ct479+7800gt= $750. Whereas 3200+ + dfi Ultra-D + 7800gt = <$575. Hard to justify the dothan with price/perf at that point.
Dothan 730's go for as low as $50 on eBay, averaging slightly under the $100 mark, some new some OEM pulls (they are quite common because they are the lowest speed grade 533 FSB Pentium-M). It's a huge price differential between actually buying a Dothan 730 from a retailer (which is upwards of $250). The reason is simple, all the components required (minus the CT-479 adapter) are niche products: extremely expensive to buy retail but also relatively cheap 2nd hand or on eBay. As a poor college student, I bought the CT-479 new and the board/CPU off eBay for a combined total of less than $300 quite a while ago.
Although seriously, if Intel redid an i875PE with PCI-E support on a socket479 to natively support Pentium-M at a default 800 FSB in a desktop, it would pretty much eliminate the single processor performance gap.
Not to mention a Dothan at 2.6Ghz will consume... 40W of power maybe? I think a Venice overclocked to the same speeds would consume about double that?
A Working dothan 730 for $50? In your dreams maybe. $100 is about as cheap as you'll see them. And they average $130-140. They are all dell pulls and trust me when I say that's a bad thing. A decent shot at a GOOD Dothan will cost $200+ unless you buy second hand and pretested to 2.6-2.7ish which will run ~$150. And p4p800se are 65-75$ on ebay plus usually $15 shipping.
BTW, I was poking around the prices a bit...
A P4GD1 is NOT $200. You have to go to a European retailer (it was never released in North America), which sells them for around 75 Euros, shipping to the USA will probably be another 10 Euros, so thats about $110ish for the board shipped to the USA, comparable to an Asus A8N series. The CT-479 adapter is around $45-50. A Dothan 730 for $50? Yes they go about as low. I said they average slightly under $100 (compared to slightly over $200 for a retail one)**. Celeron-M/1MB/400FSB will goes for around $20-30 on eBay (compared to $100ish retail). Huge difference (200%+) in retail/eBay. On a side note, there is absolutely no difference between a Dell/Gateway/Compaq OEM pull and a retail one, as long as they are the same stepping (C0).
As for benchmarks, I'll just google some up:
Anandtech Stock 2.13Ghz/133FSB:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2382&p=3 (like 10 pages)
Anandtech Overclocked to 2.56GHz/160FSB:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2382&p=10 (4 pages or so)
French Site x86-secret.com (A-FX@2.8Ghz vs P4-EE@4.1Ghz vs Dothan@2.77Ghz/185FSB)
http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/divers/ct479/ct479-4.htm
X-Bit Labs (2.26Ghz/533FSB Default):
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/pentiumm-780_15.html
GamePC.com (2.13GHz/533FSB Default and 2.7Ghz@??? FSB):
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=770ct479&page=7
Power Consumption from XBit-Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/pentiumm-780_9.html (A Pentium-M 780 runs at a default 2.26Ghz clock speed)
Power Consumption from GamePC:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=770ct479&page=4
In summary, I think an Overclocked Dothan is one of the better deals out there. It can
almost match an Athlon64 in price/performance (if you know where to buy parts for it). Pretty much match it in performance. And dominate it in Performance/Watt comparison. It is definitely superior to ANY Pentium-4 based desktop, IMO, unless you feel like Media-Encoding for an ungodly amount of time. Also, there is no reason to believe that it won't scale as good with a PCI-E 7800GT, assuming you have the PCI-E P4GD1 or P4GPL-X.
Edit:
** Think about who would be buying a Dothan 730. Obviously no one will buy it to upgrade their laptop CPU, because the 730 is the lowest grade of 533FSB cpu's. Older laptops with 400FSB Banias/Dothans cant take a 533 chip. Thus, the only viable market left for Dothan 730 buyers are people who want to put them in desktops or those with a 533FSB CPU that died. I would think the latter to be quite smaller than the former.