FSB 800 or 667 mhz? and 7200 or 5400 RPM?

Short story: is it worth it to get 800 mhz over 667 mhz? Does the performance increase a lot?

Same story for the 7200 vs 5400 RPM HD. Will getting 7200 RPM increase data transfer speed a lot?

specs of the laptop that I'm looking to buy:

Dell M1330 (13 inch)
Core2Duo 2.0 Ghz - 2 MB L2 cache
3 GB
160 GB
8400M GS 128 MB

Intended use of the laptop: photoshop to edit pics when I'm on vacation, maybe some video editing and lots of word processing and simple games such as counter-strike: source.

I'm pretty tight on budget and I'm wondering if its worth it to shell out another 70-100 euro's for these features.

 

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Bumpage.

 

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Imagine a tunnel. One tunnel is 10 feet wide and the other is about 6 feet wide. Which one could carry more water through it? So the higher the number with the FSB the better the flow rate is going to be.

The same holds true about the speeds, the faster speed will always move data faster if the throughput is great enough to do so.

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By spending more you would achieve a better machine BUT do you need the extra speed? I don't know what you are going to be using this for but if you want to use it for gaming it won't help that much more but a better and faster graphics card would be a better way to spend your money.

 

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You probably would not be able to tell the difference between the two with average computing. You would probably only see the difference if you ran a benchmark program.

 

Thanks you two. I know what FSB is, but I was hoping for more specific information regarding the performance of the applications that I listed. Also, will my current hardware be able to reach its full potential with 667 mhz?

 

7200 rpm vs 5400 rpm

To be honest some 5400 rpm drives could match the read/write access of a 7200 rpm drive and beyond, the main reason for this is that the RPM is not something to measure a drive alone. It's merely one dimension of a vector which is comprised of data like the number Heads and Cylinders. There is also the potential that the drive itself can have a certain amount of it's own CACHE RAM to speed up drive transfers and lessen Dirty data transfers.

Another point is the Drive's ability to transfer data based upon it's connection, is it IDE, SATA1 or SATA2 or some other type? Does your computer allow the faster transfer version of these connection types or will it limit it to v1.# speeds?

So when you make a decision on drives, you should try and take that into account.

For the most part it is accepted that most 7200rpm drives will give greater performance than the 5400rpm (Usually because they are designed to be a more expensive model with more working pieces). This will be important if you intend to play lots of games, view divx movies stored on your drive or stream mp3's etc. (The larger the data stream the more important it is for faster drives). They can also be important because of Microsoft Operating systems using Virtual Memory, where some information is stored to the drive rather than being housed in the RAM.

 

Personally, I'd go with a 7200 rpm drive over a 5400 rpm any day of the week.

The only exception is if you're buying a system, and the 5400 rpm drive being offered is cheaper and has dramatically more storage capacity than the 7200.

If I'm looking at a 120 gig 7200 rpm drive vs a 500 gig 5400 rpm for the same price, I'll go with the 5400.

 

well... it's pretty simple stuff...

every second... 133 million more 'things', cycles, happen on an 800 mhz FSB...

and over the course of any ten seconds, no matter what you are doing, that's 1,330,000,000 more cycles of productive computing... 1.3 billion execution units or cycles is quite a bit...

i can tell a difference between the two just browsing the web...

but if your budget is tight... 667 isn't crap by any means...