AMD Mobile? Help me please.

Ok... can somone give me a basic rundown of the difference between a mobile cpu, and a regular amd cpu. and why its such a big deal to have or get a mobile cpu? thank you.

Curtosey
of felinusz


"WHAT IS A MOBILE BARTON?

The Mobile Barton processor has recently become the Socket A overclocking chip of choice. Why?

There are several reasons. The first, is the unlocked multiplier of all Mobile Barton processors. As many of us know, all Desktop Barton processors produced after week 39 of 2003 were produced with a hard multiplier lock, effectively disabling multiplier changes to the processors.

This hinders overclockability of the chips, as a greater FSB overclock is required, due to the locked and unchangeable multiplier. A FSB overclock is often hard, and expensive, to achieve, as it requires high-quality RAM, and a good, or lucky, motherboard chipset. The unlocked multiplier of the Mobile Bartons is a loophole of sorts in AMD's processor locking policy.

All Mobile AMD processors support a feature called PowerNow! (an integral part of AMD's Mobile processor marketing plan - it isn't going anywhere soon), which alters a mobile processor's speed based on the CPU load. So, if the laptop machine a Mobile chip is installed in is simply idling, or being used to write up a word document, the PowerNow! feature will manipulate the multiplier of the processor on-the-fly to underclock the chip, making it use less battery power. If the laptop is being used for some CPU intensive work, such as running Prime95, PowerNow! will manipulate the multiplier of the processor on-the-fly to raise the speed of the CPU; to accomodate the intensive program being run, also increasing the power useage of the processor. This boils down to all Mobile Barton processors being multiplier unlocked, no exceptions.

The second reason these chips are such popular overclockers is the low stock voltage that Mobile processors use. A low stock voltage means a high overclocking potential - if a processor (in this case, Mobile Bartons) can handle its stock speed stably with a lower voltage than other's of its kind (in this case, Desktop Bartons), then it is very likely it will be able to handle higher (overclocked) speeds at a lower voltage than other's of its kind, as well. The Mobile Barton processor uses a stock Vcore voltage of 1.45V - an incredible 0.2V lower than the 1.65V stock Vcore voltage of the Desktop Barton 2500+. As you can see below, stable results exceeding 2600 MHz on moderate air cooling are not rare with these processors, while using relatively low Vcore voltages.

Why do these chips use such a low stock voltage? They are intended for use in laptop computers, where power consumption and battery life is a major marketing concern.

To sum the Mobile Barton up, it could be said that AMD has essentially picked the cream of the Barton crop, the chips which can run stably with a sub-stock Vcore voltage, and then unlocked them for us through the laptop PowerNow! feature - unintentioanlly creating the ideal overclockers chip. The overclocking results are what you see before, and below, you.
"

ah i see.. thank you for that, its actually sorta what i had in my head, i just needed someone who knew the fact to clear it up for me.

now my 2400+ tbred came unlocked, is this true with all tbreds? and is it deffinatly worth me buying a mobile barton processor? will i be able to get much more performance out of it then my 2400+ tbred?

NO, you should'nt notice much difference since your already at 2300Mhz.

look at my system

Here are my scores.
3dmark2001: 18,564
3dmark2003: 6681
Aquamark3: 52,128
BotMatch: 267/98

Hardly noticable IMO and I'm runing at signifigantly higher speed and Higher FSB.

yeah your scores arent to much higher then mine, you pull hard in 2001 cause of teh CPU difference, but my videocard makes up in 2003. but seeing as how its a barton core? is that much different from tbred in performance? like would a barton @ 2300, be that much better then a tbred at 2300?

i am going to be adding watercooling soon, and whatever chip i can get the most out of i will, guess since i was lucky enough to get an unlocked tbred i can stick with that, but i dunno, always trying to get faster!