Pentium M @ AOpen i855GMEm-LFS

Zitat

First off, the Pentium-M chip is a fairly good performer all around. The chip actually puts up numbers on par with Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and Athlon64 FX-55 in gaming, which is no easy feat. In the majority of benchmarks, the Pentium-M at 2.0 GHz can perform roughly on par with a 3.2 GHz P4 or an Athlon64 3200+ processor. Not great, but not terrible either. Some areas, like video encoding, really show the limitations of the Pentium-M architecture and the processor simply doesn’t perform that well considering its $450 price tag. While every processor has areas which it excels in, the Pentium-M processor seems to be a bit more extreme in its varying performance levels between applications. Some applications will just run insanely fast on the Pentium-M, while others will struggle to keep up. Overall though, performance is still certainly acceptable for the vast majority of applications.

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We’re very happy with AOpen’s first Pentium-M platform, and this company should be given kudos for taking the risk of producing such a board for a platform which so many people know nothing about. The board has just about all the features we could want or expect in an 855-series platform, and offers quite a bit of flexibility for those who want to tweak their platforms to their fullest. It’s certainly possible to build a very high performance system with a Pentium-M processor and AOpen’s new i855GMEm-LFS board. This board is expected to start shipping in its finalized state this week and will likely sell for around $275.

Intel’s Dothan core, unfortunately, suffers the most due to its aging 855 chipset backbone. In order for the Pentium-M processor to make any real inroads in the enthusiast crowd, many will want a new chipset with PCI Express, native SATA RAID, and perhaps a dual channel memory interface which supports more than 2GB of memory. Perhaps we’ll see such a chipset in the near future, but we’re not holding our breath for now.