pentium m versus P4 line

[poly4life]

I'm seriously contemplating buying the ct479 adapter for my compatible 478 board. I'm running a P4 3 GHz 512KB cache CPU (northwood). How much more performance would I get out of a Pentium M at or near 2 GHz? And how does the upper-echelon of Pentium M chips compare to the P4 line? In other words, what are the equivalent P4 chips to the M chips, if you could put it a label on it?

The Pentium M 745 looks pretty good and the price is not too bad. Here are some concerns that I hope someone out there can answer. First, can I run the RAM in dual channel mode if I use the M 745? It's FSB is 400 MHz, but the RAM (in my system) runs at an effective cycle of 800 MHz, and the CPU I have has a FSB of 800 Mhz? Second, at price limit of around $300 for the CPU, what Pentium M would any of your recommend?

I know the M is a serious chip and I actually like it a lot more than the P4 line. It's piped design is far superior, easily. Oh, and does anyone know if there other hardware upgrades associated with running an M chip on a socket 478 desktop board?

Thank you all for your input.

[RamonGTP]

You won't get better performance. You'll get less power consumption and a cooler running PC which will allow you to run low rpm fans which in turn gives you a quieter system. Your P4 3 gig should be more powerfull than any current Pentium M series.

[widget2003]

i thought those Pentium M chips running at 2 gigz were like fully awesome and would challenge most P4's??

[Midknyte]

THG has a comparison.
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20050525/index.html

there are only a few boards out there that are native 855 chipset. only the Asus boards are compatible with the 479-478 adapters.

the P-Ms are better per clock, but you pretty much have to overclock them to be competitive. you can't find really good aftermarket heatsinks either. the board would be limited to AGP, since there are no PCIe 478 boards out there.

unless you already have a compatible asus board, i wouldn't even consider it. AGP is fine for now, but PCIe is the way of the future.