SPCR

As much fun as it is to undervolt CPUs and spend your life making one-off hardware hacks (and your afterlife repairing and debugging these) ... I'd much rather buy a good solution.

I Am extremely impressed with the power vs performance of my Dothan Pentium-M laptop. It beats my 2.6 P4HT system on nearly all occasions and never exceeds 25-26 watts for the entire system and ~16-17watts iw/ speedstep. I agree thius is not competitive with the top 64 bit architectures, but it is really close enough for anything but gamers and seriously memory+compute intensive modelling and video editting. Could easily be passively cooled.

If I coud buy a decent PentiumM Dothan motherboard I would do so today. Why aren't these available ? I see a news report that there is one in Japan. Can anyone tell me how to find this or other similar boards ?

thanks for your thoughts,
-Steve

Ever try to explain to someone not computer hardware knowlegeable why they they should buy a Pentium M or Athlon XP laptop rather than a P4 or P4-M? It takes a lot of explaining. So the market you're talking about is still very small, and the parts will be expensive when they do become available.

stevea wrote:If I coud buy a decent PentiumM Dothan motherboard I would do so today. Why aren't these available ? I see a news report that there is one in Japan. Can anyone tell me how to find this or other similar boards ?

check ultim8pc.co.uk
they have a mini-itx mb for pentium-m

DanceMan wrote:Ever try to explain to someone not computer hardware knowlegeable why they they should buy a Pentium M or Athlon XP laptop rather than a P4 or P4-M? It takes a lot of explaining. So the market you're talking about is still very small, and the parts will be expensive when they do become available.

I see your point danceman. In the past several weeks I have been in the local computer shops a bit and have overheard the teanage salepersons "guiding" customers in their system choices. This is truly the blind leading the blind (or the ignorant leading the ignorant).

One kid was pushing a fast P4 laptop on a customer looking for a desktop replacement to be used on business trips. He didn't bother to mention that the system would probably have a 1 hour battery life with that processor cost $200 more and use 20 watts more than a very comparable Athlon laptop from the same mfgr (HP/Compaq).

I asked one sales-droid where they kept their memory and this moron immediately advised me to get 512MB without any information on my situation whatsoever !

On Friday I overheard a sales-nitwit telling a customer that he needed a "broadband" router to handle multiple ethernet connections in his home quickly. Doh !

Unfortunately the problem applies to the silentPC dilemma in general. Until some major company makes a major marketting thrust for SilentPCs we won't have any except for cobbled togather bits.

xlyz wrote:

stevea wrote:If I coud buy a decent PentiumM Dothan motherboard I would do so today. Why aren't these available ? I see a news report that there is one in Japan. Can anyone tell me how to find this or other similar boards ?

check ultim8pc.co.uk
they have a mini-itx mb for pentium-m

Thanks XLYZ,

These guys are advertizing the Commel (Taiwan)board:
http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/LV-671.HTM

I see that Lippert Germany also has a mini-ITx board in the works.

Someone is packaging one up on ebay ...
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 13458&rd=1

Which is an interesting if pricey box for $1300. The small (and probably noisey) fan is clearly pictured. I think that a bit larger case and fully passive cooling would make this system a real knockout.

-S

http://www.bwi.com/ sells them

Doesn't this Pentium-M board look a bit strange?
It is missing the normal Motherboard power connector!
It has the 4-pin square connector and a Molex connector on board. Very odd configuration. I guess they need some kind of special connector that goes to one of the small connectors or something similar.
Otherwise they would not have a "turn-on-PSU" or even the +5VSB.
It could be that they are really missing the turn off feature, as it is seldome required on industrial boards.

DC power input is also on the board

EDIT: look at the lower right corner. It's got a place to plug the power switch.

haha.. stevea, was this at a fry's store? (because they do get commissions)

following up with the link Trip gave, i saw this:
http://www.bwi.com/scripts/site/site_pr ... 3/id/9689/
- Ricoh FB8M *micro-atx* mobo--rebranded on their site to "RackPaq"-- with: 2x 32-bit PCI, 1x PCI-X, AGP, 2x SATA, 2x PATA, 2x DDR333, built-in audio/video, 100mb lan, etc.
- official PDF

.. they don't list the price and also state that it comes with some "minimum order requirements" ??

stevea wrote: If I could buy a decent PentiumM Dothan motherboard I would do so today. Why aren't these available ? I see a news report that there is one in Japan. Can anyone tell me how to find this or other similar boards ?

We've had several large threads about Pentium-M/socket 855 boards here over the past year. Use the search and read about all the crap some of the folks here have been going through to try and get a P-M board. It's been very frustrating and nobody's had any decent results so far.

I feel your pain homes. I'd also buy one right this second if it had standard ATX-type connectors (including an AGP slot) and was somewhat less than $400. Unfortunately, this seems to be only a dream at this point.

here's a PIII board w/ AGP, for $125

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... 55gme.html

AOpen microATX
AGP×1、PCI×3、DDR DIMM×2
Serial ATA II
Gigabit Ethernet

Available early October around US$270

Best of all looks like P4 heatsink bracket on the board

plyy wrote:http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... 55gme.html

AOpen microATX
AGP×1、PCI×3、DDR DIMM×2
Serial ATA II
Gigabit Ethernet

Available early October around US$270

Best of all looks like P4 heatsink bracket on the board

Big thread about this board here from a week or two ago. Including AOpen's announcement (through MikeC) that this board won't be available for sale in the US or Canada.

I'm using the PFU PD-41PM160M1 Pentium m M-ATX Motherboard with Silverstone LC-05 and a 150W brick type PSU

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... d41pm.html

Just finishing up the build and taking some pictures so that i can hopefully submit a article to MikeC


Tora

what speed pen-m? Heatsink/fan?

Thx,
Chriis

2Ghz Pentium M with a solid copper heat sink (and a 80mm low rpm fan due to the poor airflow in the case )

Tora

Tora wrote:I'm using the PFU PD-41PM160M1 Pentium m M-ATX Motherboard with Silverstone LC-05 and a 150W brick type PSU
http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... d41pm.html
Just finishing up the build and taking some pictures so that i can hopefully submit a article to MikeC
Tora

I look forward to it.

This still kills me--well over a year (approaching two, perhaps?) after the release of the Pentium-M chips, there still isn't a viable desktop solution for consumers. I have a 1.3 ghz Banias core with an ATI Radeon 9000 (mobile version of course) in a Dell 600m that I absolutly love, but the bad thing is I had to get a laptop to get the chip. It has plenty of processing power for my needs--I do large compiles using VS. NET 2005 (whidbey), run Dreamweaver and Photoshop, play WC3 (no problem), etc. It's a great system, and it's a shame that it isn't available to consumers.

The other funny thing about my laptop is that the entire solution (LCD screen, video card, processor, etc.) comes with a 45 watt power supply.

Yes, tell us about it

We've been crying for Pentium M motherboards and CPU availability (pricing/sellers) for over a year now.

Nothing has happened.

Some manufacturers have promised that they have something 'in the works' for late 2004.

We'll see if that materializes or not.

My hope is that now that Intel has the silly processor numbering scheme, they are paving the way for Pentium M derived desktop cpus other than the next Pentium 4 successor.