Dothan verses Northwood

The Nano is OOO, it's a bid on making a better performing CPU that can be used in low end laptops and desktops. It's faster than the Atom but eats more power. It would be useful to see it pitted against AMD Neo (an underclocked 65nm single core Athlon 64) ; more interesting will be the 45nm version, if it's shaping well (dual core, with disabled single core versions for netbooks)

 

Nano right now is inferior to 90nm Dothan on both power and performance (see Tech Report), and the chipsets from VIA are likely to always be disappointing compared to what the competition can dish out, so I don't see it ever being any sort of really tangible improvement over the other options.

 

It does.

 

It's finding it's way into netbooks, but I have a feeling that might be on cost. AMD seems to offer chips in the power usage, as does Intel.

Some company made a sub-netbook form factor unit (think oqo sized) that used an underclocked turion x2 (800mhz). It was an interesting device, incredibly powerful for that form factor, probably under-volted as well. It was a small company, so they might be able to get away with something like that.

I don't know why AMD doesn't at least go after the ulv market. People have had luck with undervolting AMD cpus and chipsets, there should be enough out there that can that AMD could bin them and sell them for more expensive ultra portables.

 

I have a Dothan 1.6 ghz pin-mod OC'd to 2.13 ghz w/ a GeForce 6 Go 6800. I was definitely attracted to the efficiency and high over-all performance of the CPU. I do have to run most modern games at pretty low res to get acceptable performance, but I haven't reinstalled the OS in years so there's some scales hanging off of the thing.

 

As do I. Inspiron 9300 from 2005.

 

*high-five*

Same model here! I even got the "True-Life" screen upgrade, but the corners always looked a little warped though. As much as I love my machine, I played w/ a 4 month old Vostro that my friend got and it definitely seems like a better put together piece of kit.

 

I intentionally went with the 1440x900 screen to save the GPU a lot of effort. A couple of years ago I upgraded to the 7800 Go GTX. It's still quite capable of playing recent games. The CPU is a major bottleneck for some though. I rarely game on it anymore, and if I do it's retro stuff from a decade ago or so. It is way more than adequate for web browsing of course and that's what it gets used for most these days.

 

Did you need a new AC-Adapter or custom heat sinks? It seemed like a fun upgrade to do, but I heard there were some heat issues w/ that setup.

 

To install the 7800, I had to flash a modded XPS Gen2 BIOS (if I recall correctly.) And yes that BIOS requires the bigger PSU and bigger battery. But you don't need to have a battery to use the machine, so I decided to go without one at all. I've never run this thing away from an outlet anyway.

The upgrade has turned out not to be worth the money though. I did it primarily for SupCom but it turned out that the game was almost entirely CPU limited and the GPU only helped during very beginning of a game when the CPU load was low..

Still the 7800GTX is much faster than the plain 6800 Go that I had stock. I've had some fun with it. It is a furnace though.

There's a big mod guide somewhere on the NotebookForums.com forum....