Quick and Quiet: Pentium M Desktop Boards by AOpen and DFI

Pentium M Boards By AOpen And DFI Run Quick And Quiet

Let's take a look at the mobile market. Here, the Pentium M not only faces increasing competition by AMD's Athlon64 processors, but the whole Pentium 4 family as well. While the Pentium 4M comes with Intel's energy saving SpeedStep feature, lots of desktop replacement notebooks are being equipped with regular desktop Pentium 4 CPUs. Even though running a hot desktop processor in a notebook does not make much sense - the main reason being the reduction in battery life caused by the processor's high energy requirements - these devices are enjoying an excellent reception. Many increasingly heavy and non-portable notebook-like devices are being sold for applications where a desktop is not suitable but a lightweight mobile unit is not needed, such as for use in a living room.

>From a performance point of view, Intel's Pentium M at up to 2.1 GHz is not too far behind the fastest P4 processors, although it has to get by with the aged 855 platform and does not support Hyper-Threading. The real eyebrow-raiser of the Pentium M is its remarkably low thermal power of only 21 W, which is approximately 80% less than what a fast Pentium 4 produces! This fact alone was enough impetus for AOpen and DFI to finally create motherboards that allow end users to run the Pentium M in their desktop computers.

Patrick Schmid
Editor-in-Chief (2005-2006)

Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.