These initial tests certainly paint a very favourable picture of the Pentium M as a desktop solution, showing it to be quicker, less power hungry and potentially much quieter than a Pentium 4, even when the latter’s clocked 50 per cent faster. The one thing I’ve not compared yet is cost: at the time of writing, the price of a 1.6GHz Pentium M could buy you a 3.2GHz Pentium 4, which will outperform it overall especially in terms of media encoding.

Then there’s the Aopen motherboard, which at £146 (£124 ex VAT) costs typically double that of a Pentium 4 motherboard, while not having the same level of connectivity and features. So, today, a complete Pentium M desktop system will cost more than one based on a typical Pentium 4, but you’ll be getting something that consumes far less power and generates so little heat it could be cooled without any fans – to do that with a Pentium 4 would require pricier cooling solutions.

This could make a Pentium M the ultimate platform for a media PC, running silently and economically, while delivering sufficient power to handle high definition video. In next month’s hardware column I’ll be seeing how well Windows XP Media Center Edition could run on a Pentium M platform. I’ll also see if it can be cooled passively with a decent Pentium 4 heatsink alone.

In the meantime, the market for Pentium M desktop solutions is growing: DFI now has an 855-based motherboard, and Asus offers a £25 adapter, which allows Pentium Ms to work in certain Pentium 4 motherboards. Aopen will soon be selling a Pentium M motherboard based on the more up-to-date 915 chipset with support for 533MHz bus CPUs, dual-channel DDR-2 memory and PCI Express graphics.