Brian's Brain

Jul 16 2008 5:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Continued from 'CPUs and Chipsets: Centrino 2 and A Computer Status Update'...

A Best Buy promotion last Wednesday got me seriously headed down the hardware upgrade road I'd long been eyeing. Truth be told, I even placed an order, though I subsequently canceled it. This particular hardware configuration exemplifies Intel's Santa Rosa platform; it includes a Merom-generation Core 2 T7250 CPU (2 GHz, 800 MHz front side bus, 2 MBytes of L2 cache), 4 GBytes of DDR2-667 SDRAM, and a 320 GByte SATA HDD. And, at $999.99 on sale ($1249.99 regular price), the sticker shock reduction was quite alluring.

Instead, I went with a factory-refurbished unit from the Dell Outlet (Dell, like Apple, offers refurbs with identical warranty terms to brand new units). Unfortunately, I missed out on a 15%-off promotion that expired at the end of June. But, by purchasing a 3-year Complete Care warranty (which I was planning on doing anyway), I still got 7% knocked off the $799.99 list price. For that jaw-dropping deal (or at least I think so, considering the MSRP on brand new units), my system only contains 2 GBytes of (easily user-upgraded) DDR2-667 SDRAM, along with a (ditto) 160 GByte SATA HDD. The CPU is only a Core 2 Duo T5450 (1.66 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 2 MByte L2 cache). And it's Crimson (but not too Crimson) Red, versus the Best Buy system's Tuxedo Black color scheme.

But it comes with Windows Vista Ultimate; the Best Buy unit only had Windows Vista Home Premium. It has 802.11n wireless capability; the Best Buy system only offered 802.11g. It includes a remote control that the Best Buy system lacked. Neither system offered boutique (translation: pricey) features such as a Blu-ray drive (yawn), Nvidia graphics subsystem (which, given recent events, I'm frankly avoiding like the plague), or LED backlight (a few mm thinner...yawn redux...). And speaking of price, need I remind you that the en-route system is $250+ (with discount) cheaper than the one I was previously planning on purchasing? Heck, it's not much more expensive than a substantially de-featured Eee PC 1000! Finally, considering that both systems contained Merom (65nm) CPUs, I figured that while the T7250 would provide incremental performance over the T5450 due to its incremental front side bus and core clock speeds (particularly important in my case for video processing tasks...keep reading for the reason why...), this added processing 'muscle' would come with a comparative battery life deficit, especially since both CPUs I was considering only offered 2 MBytes of on-chip L2 cache.

Given the degree of fiscal frugality I've already exhibited, the reason why I didn't wait for a brand new Centrino 2-based system (or even a Santa Rosa Refresh unit) might already be evident to you. Nonetheless, I'll still document the notable iterative platform improvements in each case, so you can decide for yourselves whether or not I was penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Santa Rosa Refresh (January 2008)

• Platform conversion from 65nm Merom to 45 nm Mobile Penryn CPUs
• All other system elements unchanged

Centrino 2 (aka Montevina)

• Additional dual-core Penryn CPU flavors (along with rumors of quad-core offerings to come)
• The GM45 chipset, with 1066 MHz front side bus and DDR3 SDRAM support (which probably won't amount to much from a system performance improvement standpoint until 1066 MHz FSB speeds become pervasive), and an integrated GPU core that hardware-accelerates H.264 decoding, touts 25% more (translation: two more) shader processors than its predecessor (in my to-come system), and offers hooks for external graphics processor hand-offs.
• A next-generation 802.11a/b/g/n transceiver, the WiFi Link 5300 wireless adaptor family (but, mysteriously, no mention of the previously promised WiMAX option)
• See in-depth coverage from AnandTech, Ars Technica and ExtremeTech for more details.

The enhanced video acceleration was frankly the most tempting piece of the Montevina pie for me, but I still decided not to bite.

p.s...anyone want to buy a perfectly passable Dell Inspiron 700m in excellent cosmetic condition, and with abundant system memory and a nearly new LCD and keyboard? ;-)