Centrino or P4M?

Hi all. Fairly new to this forum, but I've been visiting it for some time.

I know that this is an old debate, but all the past posts that I found were done from a gamer point of view.

Basically, I need a laptop, and my choices stopped at two Acers - one with a 1.5 Centrino (4502WLMI) and another one with a P4M@ 3.06Ghz; I do a lot of programming, so 15.4" is a must; at least 512Mb RAM because I use VMWare to work with various OSes that I need. I will probably replace the hdd with a 7200 rpm Hitachi (I hope it will not get too hot). Every now and then some America's Army or Project Entropia will be played on it as well ;-) so a good Video Card should be there as well (the integrate IntelGraphics card was the reason I ditched my old laptop). I had a Toshiba A25-S230, with a [email protected] Ghz and from a battery point of view the 3 hours of batery time I had with it were almost ok for me.

Now the question: for my needs, is it better a Centrino or I better stick with a P4?

The Centrino has 2Mb level 2 cache, which I'm sure has it's advantages. But can it beat the raw processing power of the P4M?

Cheers and hope I don't get flamed 'round here.

 

You simply need to answer the question as to what's more important, power or battery life/heat.

Editor in Chief http://www.bargainPDA.com and http://www.SPOTstop.com

 

From Tom's Hardware and some other sites I got the impression that a 1.5 Ghz Centrino with 2 MB L2 Cache has almost the same performance as a P4 @ 2.6 Ghz.

I have no experience with Centrino CPUs. Anyone found them sluggish?

 

Hi!

If u dont want central heating with the p4 to your room, buy centrino ! [ ]

6:3

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by aktu