Need help with some questions

Hi @ll, Im going to buy a PCG-GRT916Z Sony laptop, it has a Mobile Pentium 4 (3,06 GHz) and id like to solve some questions.

1. Can i set the processor's frequency with some application or through the BIOS? (I think it can be done).

2. If I limit the frequency, for example, to 1 GHz, will the fan start to spin or increase its RPM after some work time?

3. Is the fan always ON, or only when some temperature limit is exceeded.

4. The reason to buy this laptop is the Onyx 16,1" TFT screen. I've seen many laptops (Toshiba, Fujitsu, Mac, IBM, Dell, ...) and I only can say one thing about notebooks' screens, First Sony... then the others. Do you know some other laptop with a screen as good as Sony Onyx black?

5. Im interested in the fan's noise and its working. Id be grateful if you would share your knwoledge with me.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Elphin,
It sounds like your pretty concerned about fan noise.
All the CPUs made, except the pentium M draw a hugh amount of current (power). The power hungry ones (P4, mobile P4, and AMD) will need the fan running most of the time even if they are slowed down to 1Ghz. Afterall your taking a regular CPU that usually in a desktop machine would have a hugh heatsink on it as well as a full time fan and lots of space and putting it into a small enclosed space with no real room for a decent heatsink or fan and unless the fan is always running how is it going to keep cool.

If your considering ways to slow down the CPU to 1 Ghz to keep then fan quiet, then you should really think about getting a notebook with the Pentium M. Their clock speed is slower than the P4 or mobile P4 but with their optimized pipeline and large L2 cache (1MB or 2MB for the new Dothan CPU)they perform quite well. My 1.5 Ghz Pentium M benchmarks at the same level as the 2.5 Ghz P4 on my desktop system. The real advantage of the pentium M is it's low power usage, about 1/3 of other CPUs. Which means longer battery life (up to 6 hours or more) instead of 1.5-2 hours on the other CPUs. They also run alot cooler, so it needs less of a fan and most of the time the fan does not even run.

You might want to check them out before you commit to a power hungry P4. As far as the Sony goes, I have no experience with them swo theri fan may be fairly quiet, but you can bet it will probably be running most of the time.

Jack

 

I think you should check out this application (SpeedSwitch) for tweaking your processor, should help with a lot of what you're looking for:

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html