Petz, you might have read the wrong line in the Winstone 2002 benchmark. The Dell 8600 Inspiron scores a 33.3 in that benchmark, compared to 31.8 by the Voodoo M:855. That's pretty telling, don't you think? Clearly, when the playing field is level; that is, the Centrino laptop has a faster hard drive and memory with equal specs to the Athlon, then the scores are very compelling.
The CC Winstone score may or may not be accurate, but I'm sure the spread is pretty constant. Maybe if Sharkyextreme benchmarked a Pentium M system, they would also receive a higher score - it could have to do with the driver setup, or any number of things.
In terms of your numbers, the 1.7GHz Banias is 5% ahead of the 2.0GHz Athlon 64 in Business and about 11% behind in content creation. You don't think that a 1.8GHz Dothan can be performance comparable? I think it will likely have indistinguishable performance and much lower power. That justifies a fair price premium.
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