[rxkevco]

Hi all,
Have just bought a fujitsu siemens AMILO A1650 laptop.
Got a good price on ebay and i should have it by tomorrow.
It has been upgraded to 3700+ athlon xp-m proccessor, from a 3400 xp. Has 1 gb ram, 80gb hdd and all the usual usb-2, firewire , wi-fi enabled etc,,,,

Now,, i have mainly bought this laptop to use as a recording workstation using cubase SX3.
Cubase has a prefered setup of 512 ram, and a cpu speed of 2.6ghz.
It runs perfectly well on my 1.4ghz p4 desktop, but now that i am adding more audio tracks, and delving into the world of softsynth plugins i am going to need a faster processor to deal with the extra workload.
I have bought the laptop to save space, and when i get a 2nd hdd for it, i will just swap over the drives when i want to use cubase, or if i want to use the internet etc,,,, I dont want to run cubase on the same drive as web etc,, as it opens the program up to all sorts of bugs and flaws. So cubase will always have its own dedicated drive with the bare basic xp pro os.

I am still a bit confused about the comparisons between the 2 boards in relation to cpu ghz speeds.

What would the Athlon 3700+ XP-M (64 BIT), compare to , in the world of intel p4 processors. ??
What is the difference between the Athlon xp, and athlon xp-m,,,??
hope someone can shed a little light on this for me,,
cheers,,,kev.

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the athlon 3700 would compare to the intel 3.6 processor. That is why AMD uses numbers instead of core speed. The amd, even tho it is a lower core speed than an intel, runs just as fast as the intels core speed.

The difference between the xp and the xp-m is this.
The XP-M processors are those that test to run properly at lower voltages (approximately 1.45 volts vs. 1.65 volts) so they consume less power. Another important difference is in the clock speed and multiplier settings. The XP processors are defined by a specific bus speed and multiplier that sets its particular PR rating. In the case of the XP-M processors, the bus speed is typically fixed, but the multiplier must be able to float between a range of multipliers to help the system conserve power during low CPU usage. This combined with the wider range of voltage tolerances makes them perfect for overclocking. the Athlon XP-M processor has the advantage over the standard desktop XP processors. The voltage optimizations allow the processor to run cooler than its desktop sibling and also to have greater potential to run at higher speeds.

SRX660

[SRX660]

the athlon 3700 would compare to the intel 3.6 processor. That is why AMD uses numbers instead of core speed. The amd, even tho it is a lower core speed than an intel, runs just as fast as the intels core speed.

The difference between the xp and the xp-m is this.
The XP-M processors are those that test to run properly at lower voltages (approximately 1.45 volts vs. 1.65 volts) so they consume less power. Another important difference is in the clock speed and multiplier settings. The XP processors are defined by a specific bus speed and multiplier that sets its particular PR rating. In the case of the XP-M processors, the bus speed is typically fixed, but the multiplier must be able to float between a range of multipliers to help the system conserve power during low CPU usage. This combined with the wider range of voltage tolerances makes them perfect for overclocking. the Athlon XP-M processor has the advantage over the standard desktop XP processors. The voltage optimizations allow the processor to run cooler than its desktop sibling and also to have greater potential to run at higher speeds.

SRX660

[rxkevco]

SRX660,
Many thanks for that,,,,i sort of understand what you mean,,, ie,,,the athlon 64 bit, 3700 xp-m is more than 3 ghz if it was compared to an intel , which is fine,,so long as this laptop runs faster than 2.6 ghz then i am happy. So they consume less power, so they dont get too hot but they are just as fast as an intel equivilent.
Sorted,,,,,
I was originally going to dual boot the drive by setting up 2 partitions with seperate xp pro on each partition,, but i have been told by a few folk that it is much easier to simply have 2 drives, and just keep swapping them around . Use 1 for cubase recording and the other for internet and email etc,,, Is this that simple ?? can it be done like this ??? Wouldnt it cause problems with the drives taking them in and out all the time ??????
Do you think its a good laptop as a replacement for a desktop ???

[warriorscot]

Well in a laptop replaceing HDDs is tricky, not something you want to be doing all the time, the dual boot is a good idea, you could use linux say for your web and other general use and then keep your XP pro on a serpate partition for your cubase etc. and have another coupld of logical partitions for the data(you want to keep your data off the main system partition that way you can reinstall the OS without losing your data.

You might want to think about an external HDD for your data storage that way you can get a larger faster HDD with its own power supply.

[rxkevco]

Hi warriorscot, cheers,,, every little helps,,
I have an external 80gig hdd that i use solely for keeping back up copies of all my cds ( that i have sold), there is already about 55gig of music on there,,,,,SO,,,,,

If i buy another external hdd say a 120gb,,,,,,transfer all my music backups onto that and keep that as my second copies of all my important stuff ( pics, music etc,,),,,,then,,,,,reformat the 80gb hdd and reinstall xp pro on it, install cubase onto it, and use that as my cubase drive ( which will be bigger and faster than a laptop drive).
If i did that,,then i could use my laptop as my normal internet computer, but whenever i want to use cubase i could just plug the external drive into the usb port and run it on its own drive. Sounds good,,,
Would there be any compatibility issues with a laptop, when using a faster, bigger external drive ??

[sr71000]

If your laptop supports booting to an external drive that should work fine but remember that usb drives are going to be very slow compared to a regular ata drive, so unless your computer support external sata then I wouldn't suggest that. Also, just a heads up from before...there's no such thing as an athlon 3700 xp You were right calling it an athlon 64 3700. When they moved over to the 64 bit processors they dropped the xp from the name . Anyways....nice laptop, quite jellous! lol