THG Pits The Pentium M Against The Pentium 4
It wasn't originally our plan to have the Pentium M and the Pentium 4 face off against each other. What was initially meant to be just a simple review of an upgrade adapter for aging mainboards turned into a victory march for the Pentium M. In the end, our results led us to a very explosive conclusion: there aren't many areas where the Pentium M isn't better than the P4. And at higher clock speeds, it even becomes powerful enough to dethrone an Athlon 64 FX.
But let's take things one step at a time.
At this year's CeBIT, Asus unveiled a new adapter card that enables Pentium M processors to be used on mainboards equipped with the Pentium 4's Socket 478. This sounded like a very good idea, given that the Pentium M is known to be both sufficiently fast for many uses and very energy efficient. A system using the Pentium M but based on a desktop mainboard would remedy the weaknesses inherent in the notebook platform: single-channel memory, lack of RAID support, and lack of high-quality audio and sound solutions.
Although the CT-479 adapter card currently only works with a selection of Asus mainboards, we decided to go beyond our usual suite of benchmarks. In particular, we decided that some overclocking experiments were in order. We also wanted to keep an eye on the processor's power consumption. As you will see, the results are not merely interesting, but rather astonishing - they basically call into question the Pentium 4's "right to exist."
The basis for this project was a CT-479 adapter made by Asus. It allows the use of the energy efficient Pentium M processor on older Pentium 4 mainboards.
