Dell Inspiron 9300 or OptiPlex SX280

Blaster99

I'm going to get a PC of sorts. I do quite a bit of development work. I occasionally need a portable solution. My original thought was an SX280 as it doesn't come with any of the detuned CPU's that laptops come with to save batter life and it's portable enough if I need to bring it home or whatever and it has a really compact footprint in that the unit sits behind the monitor.

A laptop would obviously be more portable which would have some value. The Inspiron 9300 seems to have about the right price/performance for a laptop. But the CPU worries me. It's like a 2.0Ghz Pentium M. That doesn't really sound like something that would compare all that well against the 3.0Ghz CPU I was going to get with the SX280.

Any comments?

PonderStibbons

Yes. A pentium M gives you much, much more power per Mhz clock speed than an ordinary pentium. Basically they sacrifice the clock speed to lower power consumption, but they boost other stuff. So a 2GHZ Pentium M would basically crap all over an ordinary 3.0GHz pentium.

Charlie

to find a rough estimate of what a pentium m clock spped would be in pentium 4 terms, you multiply the pentium m number by 1.75. So a pentium m 1.83 is somewhat equivalent to a pentium 4 3.2. However I still find entium m far superior. they run very smootly and quietly and don't get hot whatsoever.