While enthusiast have been salivating over the power of the Pentium M processor, motherboard manufacturers have been focusing on totally different aspects of computing. Most have been releasing highly integrated small systems for specialty use (like home theatre PC, media PC's and silent PC applications).

With this in mind, testing of Pentium M processors will commence on a AOpen Mini PC MP915-B Super Multi. There will be no overclocking evaluations. Let's see how the Pentium M processor stacks up against the competition now.

Prelude to Benchmarks - Test System Configuration

Over the following page we'll be running the socket 479 Intel Pentium M 740 processor though PCSTATS standard set of productivity processor benchmarks. There are a wide variety of office and synthetic benchmarks here to illustrate what kind of performance boost users can expect from the Pentium Mobile processor.

The specific details of how the Intel Pentium M 740 processor test system was configured for benchmarking - including the hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions - are indicated below. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results on the next several pages.

PCSTATS Test System Configuations

test system #1 amd reference system intel reference system processor: intel pentium m 740 amd Athlon64 FX-62 AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ AMD Sempron 3600+ Intel Pentium D 840 Intel Pentium D 940 Socket: Socket 479 Socket AM2 Socket 775 Clock Speed: 13 x 133 MHz = 1.73 GHz 14 x 200 MHz = 2.8 GHz 13 x 200 MHz = 2.6 GHz 16 x 200 MHz = 3.2 GHz 16 x 200 MHz = 3.2 GHz Chipset: 915GM nForce 590 SLI Intel 975X Motherboards: AOpen Mini PC MP915-B Asus M2N32SLI-DLX Foxconn 975X7AA-8EKRS2H Videocard: Intel 915GM 2x MSI NX7800GTX-VT2D256E in SLI Memory: 1GB Kingston PC2-4200 DDR-2 2x 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR-2 2x 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8500 DDR-2 Memory Latency: 4-4-4-12 4-4-4-12 5-5-5-15 Hard Drive: 60GB 2.5" Hitachi 74GB Western Digital Raptor WD740 CDROM: AOpen DVD writer AOpen Combo 52x PowerSupply: 65W Delta DC12V PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 510 SLI Heatsink: AOpen Custom Athlon64 FX-62 Reference Heatsink Thermaltake Jungle 512 Software Setup: Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 Intel INF 7.2.1.103 Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 nVIDIA Forceware NF4 9.34 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 Microsoft WindowsXP SP2 Intel INF 7.2.2 nVIDIA Forceware 91.27 Benchmarks: SYSmark 2004 Business Winstone 2004 Content Creation 2004 SiSoft Sandra 2005 Maya Render Test Super Pi 1.1 PCMark05