If you?re an Intel enthusiast, the last eleven and a half months haven?t been especially bright, especially when compared to the heady days of 2002 and 2003, when Northwood hadn?t met a clockspeed it didn?t like, and Canterwood could do no wrong.  The retail market?s pre-launch anticipation of what was widely seen as Pentium 4?s pre-emptive strike against the Athlon 64 was badly deflated by the higher temperatures, decreased efficiency, and mediocre scaling Prescott actually delivered. 

The launch of Alderwood and Grantsdale in June hasn?t done much to change the situation.  While these chipsets are fine, stable products in and of themselves, they?re Prescott-only unless you?re one of the rare individuals who can afford an Extreme Edition.  For users replacing older systems the chipsets themselves could be attractive options, but they don?t offer much in the way of compelling features to the enthusiast market, and they?re saddled with Prescott?s thermal baggage.

Prescott may be as attractive as the idea of belly flopping into a concrete-filled swimming pool, but another star has been steadily rising over Santa Clara.  Intel first debuted the Pentium M (codenamed Banias) when they launched the Centrino mobile platform back in 2003, but enthusiasts didn?t really begin giving it a serious eye until Banias transitioned to 90nm, picked up an extra meg of L2 cache, and became Dothan.  Its easy to see why consumers turned off by Prescott?s thermal signature and power requirements might be attracted to the ultra-cool, low-wattage Dothan?but does Intel?s mobile processor have what it takes to compete on the desktop market?

Gaming: How We Test

Evaluating Game Performance:

Instead of running our game benchmarks in 640x480 with sound deactivated, we've decided to use settings and resolutions that reflect the ones you're likely to use when playing.  All game benchmarks, therefore, are run in 1024x768 with high detail settings. In some cases we'll demonstrate multiple resolutions to reflect performance scaling. Audio is provided by Creative Labs' Audigy2.

We've also begun extensive profiling in Half Life 2, Far Cry, and Doom 3, in addition to the series of tests we already perform in Unreal Tournament 2003 and 2004.  Rather than list map after map, however, or load pages with dozens of graphs, we've decided upon the following:

The graph itself will represent aggregate averaged performance across the entire suite of maps we tested in each game.  If you wish to drill deeper, the full set of data for each benchmark run and resolution, for each chip, will be available in JPG form.  Maps that create significant outliers or deviate from an established performance norm will be removed from the average graph and demonstrated separately for explanation purposes. 

We'd like to thank Tech Report for the use of their Doom 3 and Far Cry Maps, Hardware OC for their benchmarking tools, and Lost Circuits for their Far Cry map.  Without further ado...

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• The Pentium M Architecture (1 of 18)
• The Board and Chipset: Looks Can Be Deceiving (2 of 18)
• Board Layout (3 of 18)
• How Pentium M Compensates for 855, Overclocking (4 of 18)
• Test Setup: (5 of 18)
• Synthetic Tests: Sandra, ScienceMark, StarsCFD, Winrar. (6 of 18)
• Synthetic Tests (2): DIEP and Cachemem. (7 of 18)
• MP3 and DVD Encoding (8 of 18)
• 3D Rendering: Cinebench, 3DS Max, Lightwave (9 of 18)
• Gaming: How We Test (10 of 18)
• Game Performance: 3DMark 2001, 2003, 2005 (11 of 18)
• Gaming: Final Fantasy, Quake 3, UT2K3 & 2K4. (12 of 18)
• Gaming: Far Cry, Doom 3, Half Life 2 (13 of 18)
• Dothan Performance Torpedoes Industry Upgrade Myths (14 of 18)
• Performance Analysis: Dothan Strengths and Weaknesses (15 of 18)
• Thermals and Power. (16 of 18)
• Is Dothan Worth the Money? What About Alviso? (17 of 18)
• Why Intel Isn't Driving Dothan to Desktop, Conclusion. (18 of 18)