A Review of the Pentium M on the Desktop - Benchmarking
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For those that just can't stay patient for the DFI motherboard review coming up tomorrow, I'll allow you to see some benchmarks of just what this system can run. I'm going to hold most of them for that review -- I have to have some reason for y'all to come back and read through that, right? At any rate, let's get to some of the tests!
- Intel Pentium M 735
- AMD Sempron 3100+
- AMD Athlon 64 3200+ @ 1.8GHz
- DFI Lanparty nF3-250Gb
- DFI 855GME-MGF
- Kingston Hyper X 3000 (2*512MB)
- 2x80GB Hitachi 7K250 HD's in 64k stripe RAID 0
- Radeon 8500 LE
- Adobe After Effects
- STARS CFD Solver
- Super Pi
- Unreal Tournament 2K3
- LAME MP3 Encoding
- DivX
Adobe After Effects
There are two parts to this benchmark. The first computation is mainly CPU based, while the second is more system oriented. (For more information, please go to Media Motion: http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html) In the first test the Pentium M at a stock speed of 1.7GHz is competitive with the Sempron 3100+ and what is an imaginary A64 3000+. A normal A64 3200+ scores around 2.75 and 35 minutes respectively.
Starting right off here we see that MHz do not rule all. Even with a clock speed "disadvantage" to the AMD products, the Pentium M manages to rule the roost. Overclocked to 2.26 GHz the P-M runs right beside the 2.57GHz Sempron in both tests, barely winning the first computation and losing the more system dependent one by a little over a minute. The other piece of information to extract from this graph is how bandwidth-starved the Pentium M is at stock speed. While leaving the clock speed the same, but increasing the bus and memory speeds to 141 and 189 MHz from 100 and 133, the P-M drops a full minute off its time in the second comp.
STARS CFD
This test, provided by Oklahoma State University’s CASE Lab, is an excellent tool representing common computational fluid dynamic simulators. It's also an example of pure floating point math abilities. This had been a test where the A64 was king, absolutely beating the crap out of a Pentium4 and the Sempron. I have an old run of this same benchmark left over from my P4 2.4C system overclocked to 3.2GHz, where it ran 236s, similar to the Sempron 3100+ and Pentium M 735 at stock speed.
The Pentium M though shines when you remove its bandwidth limitation by increasing the bus and memory clocks. Increasing the clock speed makes it truly dominant, ripping off the fastest run I've managed with any of my systems of late, in any configuration. I should also mention this was done with the stock heatsink, with stock voltage, and nothing more than a little playing around with Clockgen. There's lots more speed to be extracted out of this chip than just 2.26GHz.
Next: Super Pi, Unreal Tournament >>
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