I’ve been looking at purchasing a TR, but I’m a little concerned that the 1GHz Centrino will be a disappointment.  I’m currently using a Z505 750MHz P3.  My typical upgrade criteria is that my next system must be at least twice as fast as what I am currently using.  I haven’t seen any benchmark info on the 1GHz Centrino or on the TR specifically.  Can anyone comment on performance of the TR?  I do use some processor intensive apps that consume alot of cycles.

I just received my TR2 a few days ago, which is replacing a 700MHz PIII SR17K. It definitely feels twice as fast as the SR, even more so with all the WinXP eye candy turned off. The Pentium M is a much better chip than the PIII, and outperforms it clock-for-clock. You can read more about it in-depth at the following link:

http://www.anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.html?i=1800

Compared to my SR, the system bus on the TR runs at 400 MHz instead of 100, the RAM is DDR-266 instead of PC-100, and has 1GB RAM instead of 256MB. All in all, the other system improvements along with the new CPU make the TR quite a good performer, not a disappointment at all. If you’re looking for even better performance, Sony’s Z1 is much better for the same price, though it’s bigger, heavier, and not as cool.

I’m in the process of throwing together a gaming benchmark review so you can get an idea of what the performance is like on some modern games. It should be up later today.

I don’t know how accurate a gaming benchmark will be for the TR. It has the rather slow Intel 855GM-based video chipset, which IIRC doesn’t even have hardware T&L. If you compare it to something running an ATI or nVidia video chipset, it’s going to get spanked. I’d definitely like to see non-video based benchmarks for the ULV Pentium-M systems compared with the equivalent Pentium 4 systems. The rule of thumb I’ve always been told is that the P-Ms perform about equal to a P4 clocked 500 MHz faster.

Yea, I’ve heard about the 500-700MHz processor comparisons, but I guess I’m skeptical (or I’ve bought into the Intel faster processor marketing propoganda).  I haven’t seen any comparisons for any of the Centrino processors versus the Pentium 4 or 4-M and I just need some validation that I won’t be disappointed by an “under-powered” system.

It’s going to be hard to do exact comparisons with Pentium 4 and Pentium 4-M systems since there will be a lot of different variables. For one, most Pentium M systems will usually be configured to use the integrated graphics although larger systems will use discrete graphics solutions (ATI Radeon Mobility 9x00 or GeForce Go 5x00).

Most Pentium 4 or 4M systems are targeted toward larger notebooks or “desknote” systems and will likely be configured with faster graphics and larger/faster hard disks.

Anandtech had a great article that had a pretty decent comparison (as close as you’re going to see) of how well Pentium-M performs versus the Pentium 4 desktop chip.

Pretty damn impressive. Unfortunately, all of the tests I’ve seen use the higher-speed 1.6GHz chip rather than the ULV one in our TRs… One thing that wasn’t discussed in the commentary about the Content Creation benchmarks is that the P4 desktop system listed had a 7200 rpm hard drive while the two Pentium-Ms tested either had a 4200 rpm or a 5400 rpm drive. Assuming it’s a true content creation bench, there will be a lot of disk writes, which should adversly affect the performance of the Pentium-M systems.

Yea, I know its hard to come up with comparisons.  Its just frustrating that I really have no idea of what I am buying.  This is the first time I am considering buying a notebook without knowing roughing what kind of performance to expect.  It seems that most reviews are focusing on size and battery life.  I have little use for battery life as my notebook is plugged in almost always.  I do like small, and a good screen is critical, but I need some horsepower as well.  The V505 would be nice if it wasn’t so big, had a better screen, and apparently, better reliability.

What kind of performance are you expecting? For instance, what kinds of applications are you going to run? Also, what kind of computer are you running now? Are you happy with the performance of it? Do you want something just as fast? faster? or slightly slower would be ok?

Perhaps we can give you a better indication of performance based on what your needs are.

My desktop system is the following:

Pentium 4 2.4Ghz (533Mhz FSB)
2GB of DDR DRAM
80GB hard disk
DVD/CDRW combo drive
ATI Radeon 9700 128MB
17.4” SGI 1600SW (16:9 widescreen) 1600x1024 LCD monitor

I use the system primarily for web development, DV editing with Premiere, image editing with Photoshop, web surfing, watching media clips, ripping CDs and listening to music, occasional gaming and pretty much anything I need to do.

I also have another system that has an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ with 1GB of DDR, ATI Radeon 9600 256MB, and roughly 280GB worth of storage space.

So, that’s normally the kind of performance I’m used to. It’s reasonably fast stuff and generally much faster than what you’ll see in most notebooks. I can run benchmarks comparing both systems to give you “numbers” but I don’t think it’s a fair comparison (due to inequalities in hard disk and video subsystems). I can give you my honest opinion about how I “think” the performance is compared to these other systems that I use.

The TR1 (and the TR2 for that matter) performs nimbly. I was actually surprised at how fast the system runs with this seemingly measily 900Mhz processor. It’s fast and much faster than you think. I can do nearly all of the things I mentioned above and do them pretty well. Working in two of the more demanding apps (Photoshop and Premiere) is no chore at all. The only limiting factor is the hard disk (in terms of capacity and speed) and that’s normally eliminated by the use of a faster Firewire/USB2 external drive running at 5400RPM or even 7200RPM. Other than that, multitasking is no problem as I’m typically using e-mail, browser (with at least 5 windows), HTML editor, CSS editor, explorer, photoshop and FTP applications and switching between them is no sweat. I also have all of the Windows XP eye candy turned on as well. Disabling it only makes everything faster although having it on doesn’t really drag the system very much.

The bottom line is that the “lower 900MHz to 1Ghz” shouldn’t scare you away. This does not perform like a 900Mhz machine…it definitely feels faster than that. And even though I’m not a huge fan of integrated graphics, the built-in Intel Extreme Graphics 2 chipset really isn’t too shabby. If you saw my gaming post, it’s not the best but it’s reasonably competent. The fact that it can push nearly 60fps in Quake III is nothing to sneeze at.

If you want, I can try to run some CPU-dependent benchmarks on the various CPUs that I have to give you a better idea of what the performance is like. I can test stuff like MP3 encoding, DivX encoding and the like so you get a better idea. Let me (and everyone else here) know what kinds of apps you use and perhaps we can give you better insight.