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Intel's Pentium 4 processor has finally made its way into notebooks, debuting at 1.6 GHz and 1.7 GHz, and promising ever-faster speeds down the road. The chip certainly has the headroom to grow, and new systems carrying the processor have a faster frontside bus and speedier memory. If your work mostly involves standard productivity apps, though, you may be better off saving money and opting for a 1.2-GHz Pentium III-M-based laptop.

Like the Pentium III-M CPUs, the new Pentium 4-M is manufactured under the .13-micron process, which yields relatively power-efficient chips and lets Intel pack in 512KB of performance-enhancing Level 2 cache. The process also allows Intel to decrease the mobile P4's voltage to 1.3 volts (versus its desktop counterpart's typical 1.5 volts). This arrangement helps it run cooler; its heat dissipation is the same as the PIII-M chip's.

The new 845 chip set supports the Pentium 4-M's 400-MHz frontside bus--the same as the desktop P4--a marked improvement on the PIII-M's 133-MHz bus. With this new chip set, the Intel mobile platform gets new memory as well: 266-MHz DDR SDRAM instead of the more familiar PC133 SDRAM. Besides being faster, the new memory should also be slightly more power-efficient than the previous standard.

We looked at one of the first P4-M-based notebooks, a preproduction version of Dell's new Inspiron 8200, equipped with a 1.7-GHz P4-M chip. For comparison, we also tested Dell's previous model, an Inspiron 8100 unit carrying a 1.2-GHz PIII-M processor, and one of the first shipping notebooks to use AMD's 1.2-GHz mobile Athlon 4 CPU, the MicroFlex NP7120 from Micro Express. All three systems ran Windows XP Professional and had 256MB of main system memory.

By the Numbers

The two Dell units performed almost identically on our PC WorldBench 4 tests, earning scores within 3 points of each other, though the Pentium III-M-based Inspiron 8100 had the edge with a score of 101 versus the 8200's 98. While this difference is small, we saw the same pattern repeated on our tests with Photoshop 6.0.1 and AutoCAD: The PIII-M-based 8100 consistently (albeit narrowly) beat its P4-M-based sibling. It's a bit disappointing that the P4-M-based system, running 500 MHz faster, merely kept pace with the PIII-M-based unit, but the same thing happened when Intel introduced its P4 desktop processors.

In fact, the only area where the P4-M-based 8200 finished ahead was on our three multimedia tests: the MusicMatch MP3 encoding test, and the video and audio Windows Media encoding tests--tasks that are strengths of the desktop P4 as well. The 8200 shaved about 5 seconds off the 8100's times on the two audio tests, and delivered its best performance on the video test, completing it about 12 seconds faster than its sibling.

The 1.2-GHz Athlon 4-based Micro Express unit earned respectable scores on our tests--including an 85 on PC WorldBench 4--but typically trailed the other two units. In part, that's due to the notebook's shared memory architecture, which causes both main memory and its graphics to draw from the same SDRAM pool, hampering performance.

The three systems earned comparably strong scores on our battery life test, ranging from 2 hours, 33 minutes (the MicroFlex) to 2 hours, 47 minutes (the Inspiron 8100). Note that all three systems' processors run at lower clock speeds under battery power: The P4-M drops to 1.2 GHz, the PIII-M goes to 800 MHz, and though we set the Athlon 4 to match the PIII-M, its lower speed can vary.

Take Me Away

Dell's Inspiron 8200 packs features that should satisfy any user looking for a desktop replacement. Along with the P4-M CPU, you get a 15-inch LCD capable of 1400 by 1050 resolution, a 30GB hard drive, NVidia GeForce2 Go graphics with 32MB of memory, a CD-RW and DVD-ROM combination drive, USB 1.1 and IEEE 1394 ports, a modem, built-in ethernet, a pointing stick, and a touchpad. Of course, you pay a cool $2599 for all those high-end features.

The Inspiron 8100 is a comparative bargain. As we tested it (equipped with the same 15-inch screen but a 20GB hard drive, 16MB of graphics RAM, and a CD-ROM drive), the unit costs just $1799. If you upgrade everything but the CPU and RAM type to match the 8200's specifications, the price jumps to about $2400--but you still save nearly $200. If you don't plan to work with video, this system may be your best bet. But you might want to act soon, since Intel will aggressively encourage vendors to move quickly away from PIII-M-based notebooks and over to the hyped P4-M.

Though it's less powerful than the Intel-based competition, the Micro Express unit offers very good value. Our test system had a 14.1-inch screen, a 20GB hard drive, an 8X DVD-ROM drive, a modem, ethernet, and a touchpad for $1199 (look for a review of this system with 384MB of RAM in this month's Top 15 Notebook PCs).

The P4-M cuts the speed gap between notebooks and desktops, though desktops maintain a firm lead with Intel CPUs running at up to 2.2 GHz. But today's mobile platform offers you plenty of power to tackle the toughest jobs around the office, at home, or wherever you travel.

SUMMARY

Dell: Inspiron 8200 Street: $2599

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