4mb cache 4gb ram

I am looking to buy a new laptop and there some components im looking for that are seriously limiting my choices, i am wonder if they are worth it. the first thing i want the laptop as future proof as possiable. that being said is 4mb of cache worth it or would the 2mb in the t5600 due. second i wanted the capability of 4gb ram in no way to i need it now but is it worth only buying a laptop that can hold 4gb max or can even those that say 2gb now later be update to hold 4. third would it be worth it to wait for intels new 800mhz FSB processors or is the current core 2 duo good enought

 

Well if I were mean and bitter I'd recommend you invest $5000 on one of those Voodoo desktop replacement behemoths. But I'm not...yet...so I'm going to recommend you re-evaluate your budget and your research.

Selecting between the T5600 and T7200 is a no brainer, and if you want to wait for Santa Rosa then be prepared for a long winter without a laptop. In fact, with Intel and their finicky release dates you may not see the 800 Mhz FSB in a notebook readily available until March of next year.

As for "future proofing", you need to understand what that term means to you. There is absolutely no need to "future proof" for word processors or web browsers at this point. Vista will be more than fine on 2Gb RAM, 1 Gb will probably do it on the 32 bit version once the final release comes out. If you are talking about games, laptops are not the way to go if you want to play new Quake-esque games on max resolution a year from now. So read around and see if a laptop will play the current generation of games on a respectable setting, and judge from there.

 

lmao....is 4gb enough.....wow...2gb is way more than plenty for 99% of applications.

4gb is a waste of battery....no longer is it a laptop then....get the dell xps m2010 though.

 

Im with you man, I'm waiting for Santa Rosa. If you don't need a laptop right now then like gatordude said, its gonna be a long winter. I think we should start some of I'm waiting for Santa Rosa group. Possibly therapeutic, no?

 

thanks i guess 4gb is overkill i just wanted to be safe but i think im going to far. also Santa Rosa really going to be that revolutionary since intel already jumped from single core 32bit to dual core 64 bit, whats left really except a little more speed?

 

It will make enough of a difference to me, but the internal a/b/g/n wireless card and WIMAX is what I'm really waiting for. Plus by then the limit on RAM won't be 4GB(I think). And by then I'm hoping DVI ports will be more prolific on certain notebooks(W3J!), we shall see.

 

The amount of cache isn't important. It's just another performance metric, alongside the clock speed. Is it worth waiting for a CPU to get 200MHz faster? is it worth waiting for it to get a bigger cache?

Bigger cache doesn't enable you to do anything new, it just makes everything go a bit faster. So I'd say it's not really worth waiting for.

The capability to support more RAM is a different matter. *If* you expect that you're going to need lots of RAM, then you should definitely wait for a notebook that supports it. Some tasks rely heavily on having enough RAM to run acceptably, so this might *for some purposes*, be an important part of "future-proofing".

But if you're not going to need that much RAM, it doesn't make a difference.

 

If you aren't using CAD applications or massive data sets in some kind of scientific computing, 2GB is more than you'll ever need. I barely use 1GB in my work machine here, and that's with several browser windows, a large java application loaded, Excel with large spreadsheets and Outlook, all open at the same time.

Go with the T7200, the 4MB of cache is a big speed enhancement over 2MB cache. Waiting for the Santa Rosa
(800MHz FSB) would not be a bad thing, per se. You'll just be waiting for a number of months. Depends on when you need your laptop. There's always something new and faster around the corner. But I hear that Santa Rosa will change the FSB speed dynamically to preserve battery power, and should do a number of things to make mobile computing even nicer.

So it depends mostly on your timeline. But you almost certainly don't need more than 2GB of RAM. Upgrade that later, if you find you need it. It's an easy upgrade, and you will almost certainly find that you don't need it.

 

"If you aren't using CAD applications or massive data sets in some kind of scientific computing, 2GB is more than you'll ever need."

I will be using cad, but for the most part 2d cad work only, such as autocad. do you think 2 gig would still be enought

 

Yeah, more than likely. Unless you're going to be loading downtown Manhattan as a DXF or something, you should be fine. I made some renderings of Copper Mountain and about 5 square miles around it with 1.25GB of RAM, worked fine.

 

thanks for the help, i see you got a pretty nice laptop on the way you worried about heat issues

 

Not really. I clock things down when I don't need the performance, so that should mitigate a lot of the heat. I'll also be using it in well-ventilated areas for the most part when it's set to be high-performance, so I'm not terribly worried.