I for one have never seen an AMD laptop in my life. What are the ones out there? What are the best and the worst? Which companies make AMD laptops? Oh and what CPUs does AMD have for lapies? Any better than Intel?
Printable View
I for one have never seen an AMD laptop in my life. What are the ones out there? What are the best and the worst? Which companies make AMD laptops? Oh and what CPUs does AMD have for lapies? Any better than Intel?
There are many AMD laptops, surprised you haven't seen any.
AMD offer the AMD64, Sempron and Turion (basically a lower voltage AMD64 mobile), as mobile processors none can top the Pentium-m for performance and batterylife but the AMD64/Turions are cheaper and also have 64 bit support.
As for which is best, depends what your definition of it is, Rock offers a laptop with an FX-57 or the X2 4800 however at the moment Acer's 50xx series notebooks with a Turion and an X700 offer a good balance of power and price. There are many out there so I'm not going into the details of all of them, it depends on your requirements for a notebook.
John
Blah seems like it's just me then.
So the Pentium M is the best one out there. What about Centrino? On my dad's laptop he has a Centrino, and it's pretty slow I must say, but I guess it depends on the rest of the parts as well. It has a Nvidia 5200 64MB, so that's just aweful I suppose.
There's even lapies with the x2 4800 out already... wow!
Alright then, I'll just do a little search around for AMD laptops and see what I get pricewise in specific, want to compare to the Intel ones.
Thanks for the info John!
"Centrino" is a marketing name that means the system has all three of the following:Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
* A Pentium M CPU
* An Intel chipset
* An Intel wireless NIC
If your dad's laptop is slow, it's likely not because of the processor.
Centrino is actually the Intel marketing name for the combination of a Pentium M, an Intel mobile chipset, and an Intel Pro/Wireless card. To say the least, the rest of the system is mostly up to the maker so you'll get vastly varying performance, although they're all based off the P-M.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
Laptops with the X2 4800 aren't exactly what I would consider laptops. More like portable desktops. :p Try using one for any more than 45 mins - 1 hour on battery... heh
I agree with John here. The Aspire 50xx series with the X700s are very nice. My only gripe with them is that the X700 is held back by the fact that the screen is WXGA, which means at max a resolution of 1280x800. Kind of lower than what I like. On the other hand, the Ferrari 4000 series are very good laptops, combining good battery life with performance and a good screen. Only problem? Cost. You're paying for the Ferrari logo and build of the laptop, which, honestly speaking, I'm not a fan of. The asthetics just don't sit well with me.
Hehe, you both posted at the same minute even! :cool:
But thanks for the info guys. So the Centrino is the M, chipset and NIC. Wait, I thought Intel didn't make chipsets. I thought it depended on the motherboard's chip. Or is this different for mobile technology?
SkyDog - yeah as I said, it's probably the rest of the parts that's causing the slow down.
Chuck - I don't even wanna picture the price of a x2 4800 on a laptop. 5k? I'm thinking I'm being generous here. Hehe...
So there's a Ferrari laptop?? Haha... this makes just laugh at it. As for the WXGA screen, my dad's also has one. 15.4", it's a Samsung X30. Aweful though I must tell you. Any resolution above 800x600 and the text bleeds, the screen just looks so unrendered with mistakes around it... blah. I heard only Dell could make a good WXGA screen.
Thanks for the info guys!
Have a friend who just got a HP AMD64 laptop and LOVES it.
Intel makes chipsets for both mobile PC's and desktop machines.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
Hrmm..??? Wait am I thinking about the wrong thing? Chipsets, like AMD's San Diego or Venice, or Winchester. These chipsets right? Well what are Intel chipsets called then?Quote:
Originally Posted by SkyDog
If battery life is a concern, Intel is really your only choice. If not AMD makes a nice mobile 64 chip!
Learux
I have a 1360 series with the WXGA 1280x800 and I am impressed with what it offers performance/price wise, and on the 50xx series it is a slightly better CrystalBrite screen.Quote:
Originally Posted by Chuck232
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
Those aren't chipset per se, they are cpu's Core. Chipset are on the motherboard. nForce (2,3,4) from nVidia, SiS, Via, Intel 915 (just to name one).
And the Intel cores have their own code names, too. The various Pentium 4 revisions have been based on cores named Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, Gallatin, and now Smithfield for the Pentium D.
Intel make very good chipsets (currently the 855 and 915 for the Pentium-m), especially their later socket 478 chipsets, the i865 and i875.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
John
Ahh... this is what you were talking about. Alright then.. well thanks for the info guys! I'm getting the hang of this.
I have a Compaq R3000z (z for AMD) with XP 2800+M (1.6 GHz). It's a great lappy for the deal I got from Office Depot back in March ($580 AR). I upgraded the HDD to 60 GB 5400 rpm, and upped the memory to 1 GB and it's been an awesome multimedia/internet computer for myself and my wife.
Tell me, how easy is it to upgrade parts on laptops? Did you do it yourself or someone who knows about these things, like a company or something?Quote:
Originally Posted by proxops-pete
Depends on the laptop really, in most cases it's easy to upgrade the ram, hard drive and mini-pci card - these are designed to be user upgradeable and in some cases easier than in a desktop. When I upgraded the ram in my laptop, it was just a case of unscrewing a single screw to remove a cover, pop the ram in and the put the cover back on. Optical drivers can be replaced as well but manufacturers tend to use custom bezels making it a little more awkward, I want to change my dvd/cd-rw to a dvd burner, I can buy a standard slimline DVD-RW drive but I need to swap the bezels and screw on a small attachment to the replacement drive.
Doing any more than that is dependent on the laptop, generally the bigger the laptop the more upgradeable it is, the ultralight laptops usually have the least upgradeable and the top desktop replacements are the more upgradeable. You can often replace the processor (although not user supported) but not much else, both Nvidia and ATi both announced modular graphics formats but so far graphics card upgrading remains very limited, at best you can normally only upgrade to another graphics card made for that design of machine.
John
Right. Well thanks for the info John! Now I know... :)
Better get a stable laptop, one that will last for a long time. I got two years ahead of me before I finish school, and then it's time to choose the laptop for college. Wonder how much things will change until then. I'm hoping AMD might come out with something to chalenge Intel's M.
Upgrading HDD was a synch. Unscrew the HDD cage/top off, take it out and replace and pop and screw it back in again. Memory, however, was a bit more of pain as their first of two memory slots is under the keyboard. :( But there is a diagram that allows you to go thru step by step to access it. In short, I did it. And if I can do it, so can you. :DQuote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
Aha... and so it is different for every laptop. How do the parts look like? Is there a site which sells laptop parts, something like NewEgg with pictures in it. I'm really interested in seeing how all the parts look like compared to a desktop PC. They're much smaller, that I'm sure of but I've just never seen any on a pic or in real life.Quote:
Originally Posted by proxops-pete
Newegg sells lappy memory and smaller lappy 2.5" HDDs as well... Lappy memory chips aer narrower and is commonly referred to as SODIMMs. Do a search and you will see... With lappy HDDs, there's an addition(?) of another spinning speed... 4200 rpm. However, to counter that low rate a bit, the lappy HDDs usually have larger caches... my 40 GB 4200 rpm had 8 MB cache and so does my 60 GB 5400 rpm drive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
As Pete has said, they usually look much the same as desktop parts, but smaller. Quite a few sites dismantle review laptops and show the parts inside, here is a THW article on the Dell XPS:Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/20050224/index.html
AT are good for showing the parts, here is the Pentium-m based 8600 in pieces:
http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=1899&p=4
John
They already have, it's called Turion although it's a rebranded mobile A64 it's a solid processor, especially for the price.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sex-Machine
John
Sweet... thank you guys for the info and the links! Hehe, it looks a bit different though. I'm impressed how well they can make them and fit in.
Much appreciated! I'm having a good look through all kinds of different parts...