Help me pick a CPU/Mobo

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Kristian Hermansen wrote:
>
> So, in conclusion, I highly recommend that you stay away from an AMD64
> laptop as a desktop replacement.  I would, instead, recommend a more
> modest choice of hardware.

AMD64 CPUs come in a variety of types, some of which are quite suitable 
for lightweight and mediumweight laptops. If you want an AMD-based 
laptop rather than an Intel-based one, the Turion64 and Turion64X2 (the 
latter is dual-core) are what you're looking for. They will offer full 
compatibility with your AMD64 server-room applications.

That said, though, the Turion64 series can't quite keep up with the 
Intel Core Duo 2 in speed or battery life, and the Core Duo 2 also has 
64-bit capability. So you'll want to have a look at Intel-based laptops 
as well. (But specifically the Core Duo 2; earlier generations of Intel 
laptop chips were not 64-bit capable.) I haven't seen any benchmarks of 
the Core Duo 2 running 64-bit code; it may lose its edge over AMD there. 
(I know that the previous generation of Intel chips, the Pentium 4 and 
Pentium D, were not good performers running 64-bit code.)

Somebody commented on video cards and watching movies. The video card 
won't improve the visual performance for movies unless your CPU is 
really marginal. Some video cards have features that speed up video 
decoding, but modern CPUs have no trouble keeping up, and the Linux 
video software mostly doesn't use the special acceleration anyway. Using 
the acceleration might improve battery life while playing DVDs because 
your CPU utilization would be lower, but you probably won't see any 
difference on the screen.

Video card performance mostly matters for 3D games. It also matters for 
the new Aero GUI in Windows Vista, but I doubt that most BLUers care 
about that.

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