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General discussion

is centrino still centrino if you have non intel graphics

Apr 7, 2005 7:37PM PDT

i know that centrino means having an intel pentium m processor, intel network and wireless cards, and intel built on graphics. if i have all the components, except something like a geforce 128mb graphics card rather than the built on intel graphics, will there still be a decent battery life, or is it really fussy about having intel components??

Discussion is locked

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Yes to subject and battery life equals
Apr 7, 2005 9:27PM PDT

How big the battery is and what amount of drain there is.

You can have a 1,000 Watt laptop and get 20 hours of battery life if the battery was the right size. This is exaggerating the answer, but you can't measure battery life except to get your setup and ... test it.

Bob

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WiFi is the one you're thinking of
Apr 8, 2005 1:19PM PDT

WiFi is the thing that makes it Centrino or not. If you have a Pro/Wireless and a Pentium M with an Intel Chipset, you've got Centrino. I have centrino on a Dell 8600 which has nVidia graphics and I still get over 4 hours of battery life.

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Pentium M and Centrino essentially the same
Apr 9, 2005 2:58AM PDT

Centrino is the official logo by Intel if the computer has all of the branded parts -- the one that mostly causes a notebook not to have the Centrino certification as Ryan says is the official minipci wireless card.

The motherboard, chipset and cpu will all be the same either way.

For best performance make sure you are getting the new Sonoma Pentium M upgrade. You want a Pentium M processor with a 0 at the end and at 720 or higher -- do not get a Pentium M Celeron which rips the performance right out.

So, a Pentium M 715, 725, 735 and 745 are the old standard with the 400mhz system bus and PC2700 RAM speed. The new Pentium M 720, 730, 740 and 750 (an old 715 is equivalent to a new 720 for mhz speed - 1.5mhz for example) has the 533mhz bus speed, faster integrated intel graphics (hopefully new dedicated graphics are coming at some point), upgraded wi-fi with less interference, and faster RAM (check this as not all models have it but supposedly new models should be faster than the older PC2700 RAM or PC2100 before that).