Intel Centrino For gaming?

[Mr.Happy]

Im thinking about purchasing a dell inspiron 9300, but was wondering about the Intel Centrino processor you get with it. Im into games such as battlefield 2, doom 3, and half life 2, etc. The specs on the inspiron 9300 i have are:

1.73 ghz centrino
256 geforce 6800
1 gig or ram
80 gig hardrive

Is the centrino a good processor for gaming? I've heard it's garbage, but never really had much expierence with them. Would it be capable of running games such as doom 3, half life 2, and battlefield 2? Your help would be greatly appreciated.

[lowlymarine]

I can run Battlefield 2 at maximum graphics with up to 32 players and experience no slowdown whatsoever. Same for DooM 3, HL2, Painkiller, and UT2004. The processor can hurt you a bit if you have a lot of bots in the game, but you have to remember that the GPU is 99 times out of 100 the bottleneck for all of your games. Also, the Pentium-M's shorter pipeline and larger L2 cache make it a far superioir gaming processor to the Celeron, Pentium 4 (excepting the 64-bit 6xx and Extreme Edition series), or Sempron (again, possibly excepting the new 64-bit Winchester core).

[madmike23]

I agree with LowlyMarine, the Centrino chip is very fast and can keep up with any game. It's the graphics card that you'll need to keep up with the gaming requirements. I would understand if you had friends that were gaming on something like an HP DV1000- a fast Centrino computer but with only basic integrated video. That would prove a problem with games like Doom3 and HL2, etc. But if you're getting a Dell 9300 with 256mb graphics, you won't have a problem with anything on the market, current and future.

[miner]

I basically agree with lowlymarine & madmike. The centrino** is a good processor & is much more efficient than the Pentium 4. The clock speed is not a good performance indicator, check out lowlymarine's FAQ in the hardware section for Pentium4 & PentiumM clock speed comparisions.

**centrino is not a processor. It is just an Intel marketing brand name. The centrino package consists of Pentium M processor, Intel chipset & Intel Wireless card(radio).

[fishfood]

Whoever told you that the centrino processor is garbage obviously does not know what they are talking about for two reasons:

1. Centrino is not a processor (as mentioned earlier), it is the marketing term for the chipset.

2. Pentium M processors (the mobile processor that is part of the centrino chipset) are just as good as any other processor for gaming. They clock for clock far superior to P4s. Also you will find that the bottle neck for games is generally the GPU.


I love it when I'm at Best Buy or Circuit City and one of their sales associates tells me about the centrino processor in such and such notebook. I always get a kick out of sales associates who don't know what they're talking about. I was actually at Best Buy a year or so ago when I first started looking for a notebook and a sales rep there was telling me about the battery saving centrino processors. I told him that the processor is actually referred to as Pentium M. He then argued that it was also called Centrino. Where upon I explained to him that centrino was the chipset...I don't think he ever really understood my argument, haha.

[Venombite]

Just a minor addition:

Centrino is the marketing term for the technology used in the latest Mobile notebooks. But for a notebook to be able to have the Centrino name associated with it, it must contain 3 things:

1. An Intel Pentium M CPU
2. An Intel 855 (& now the 955) Chipset
3. An Intel 2100, 2200 or 2915 WiFi card

Previously when the Centrino name was first introduced, any manufacturer that did not utilize all 3 technologies above (original requirement was a PM CPU, 855 chipset & 2100 WiFI), would not have the Centrino name associated with that unit. It might be different now, but I don't know if Intel relaxed their requirements since the inital release of the Centrino label.

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