I am thinking about buying a new pc and was deciding between the pentium 4 and the m processor. Does anyone know how they compare to each other performance wise? Is there a performance difference between Mobile pentium 4 and the normal pentium 4? Powerful performance for games is what im after, but i am at a loss as to what processor to choose. HELP!

Choose neither and go for AMD. They are acknowleged to have the best game performance at the moment.

The difference between the P-M and the P4 are exactly what the M stands for Mobile. It is not the hardcore performare of the family but rather the CPU that makes the Battery of your laptop last longer. If I where to buy a laptop atm I would certainly go for the P-M as it does manage to let your Laptop last longer but it sacrifices speed to do this (among other techniques).

So, as I said, go for the AMD chips for your new computer (3800+ is the king of the consumer market right now).

I agree AMD is the way to go especially if you're building a gaming pc, one of the best chips on the market, way better than Pentium.

The M series are powerful, but only buy them if you're buying a laptop since they use less battery that a regular. Also for example a 1.4 GHz M equals around a 2 GHz P4 or so I've heard... It uses less battery since its speed is relative to the amount of battery power left.

Jeah, and it is great in summer too... *ironic*

Well, I would say if you have lots of money go for an Intel Pentium IV Extreme Edition with HT. Considering the cost of course ($750+ extra for the same speed) I would say you better go for FX55 or whatever it is called by AMD.

I would not advise going for a pentium M chip for a desktop pc. I have a laptop with that cpu, and though it is fine, there are some little things that ruins it for me. Also I think the M version is slower than the same cycles desktop pentiums as far as I know. Unless you are not interested in the best performance, you could consider the M for less power consumption or whatever. :whistle:

The Pentium M requires less cooling (hence, is lighter) and has speed stepping (regulating the speed as your battery discharges, for maximum life; although this is all controllable).

What's been said before about it's performance is all wrong - in performance tests, the P-M perfomrs as almost the equivalent of a P-4 with twice the frequency. Certainly, my P-M 1.8GHz is a good bit faster than my P-4 2GHz desktop! My machine is happily able to run any (modern) games I've thrown at it, and DOSBox has been perfect so far (although I haven't tried any overly demanding DOS games yet)

All that said though - AMD do seem to be the way to go. However, if you go with P-M (and I'm assuming you're talking laptops here) you will get the whole "Centrino" system, which means you'll have a wireless networking antenna virtually running the length of your case. Having seen the difference in signal quality between laptops with and without, I would say that this is a must (if you're going to use it that is!)

Jim6 any idea how the speed is controllable? I can't make my laptop pentium m work at full speed all the time no matter what. If I disable the speedstep it drops permanately at 1.2 while with it on it switches all the time and rarely stays constantly at 1.7 (full speed). I have even started a thread about it.

Maybe in the times of Athlons and Durons, but today with FX(64 bit) series, AMD is way cooler(in every meaning of that word) than Pentium, Prescott core(P4) is the one that tends to overheat....

:ok: I have AMD 64+ 3800 and he is best proc. what I have. before this proc. I have Pentium 4.2 but he is sllooooover!