Bottle-neck

I often hear that RAM is the bottle-neck before the CPU, and the Hard drive too. How much RAM would it take to make the T7300 cpu (2.0ghz, 800mhz fsb, 4mb L2 cache) be the bottle-neck? And will a 7200 rpm HDD avoid bottlenecks from the HDD entirely?

 

CPU fastest RAM 2nd HDD slowest
RAM XP 1GB minimum 2GB better Vista 2GB minimum 3GB maybe 4GB (whole nother can of worms) better.
7200 will still be the bottleneck on HDD intensive apps, 7200 might help lesson but HDD will always be the bottleneck because no matter how fast even 20,000 would be slower than RAM, that is why not enough Ram becomes a bottleneck it has to go to the HDD and that slows things down. In a well designed system HDD will be the bottleneck and a 7200 bottleneck is better than 4200 bottleneck.

 

supposing a T7300 cpu...

Could that cpu ever be the bottle-neck?

 

What about a Solid State Hard drive? Would that make the hard drive as fast as the ram?

 

the cpu is never the bottleneck. Its the fastest thing in the system.
Basically you take the buss multiplier and divide the cpu clock by that. Thats how fast your ram is going. Maybe if its dual channel it will approach one sixth or one eight of the bandwidth of the cpu. Thats why Cpu's have L1, L2, and L3 cache. So they can do stuff while waiting for ram to go out, come back and go out again. HDDs are a serious bottleneck. While ram and cpu differ by a multiple of the buss speed. The HDD is an order of magnitude slower. The network connection again slower than that, and the DSL or cable modem connection is a mere trickle.
About XP 1gb minimum. I have to disagree. Plenty of folks run XP with 512mb comfortably. I myself was an insane extreme madmab when I upped all my DAWs to 1gb a few years back, and now 2gb. this is required for me to do audio work. But whne I am just screwing around on the internet rarely do I exceed 512mb. Even with Firefox.

 

Then again, bottlenecks would depend on the task you're running. If you're playing an already loaded game, then chances are that CPU and GPU will be causing your bottleneck, as data from the HD is already loaded into memory. If you are copying files, then naturally your HD or connection speed, if you're doing it accross a network, would be your bottleneck.
If you're running a task that requires all resources, for example running a batch program that performs complex calculations and then creates 3D rendered vectored models representing the data, and storing the models on both your HD and a networked backup HD, then your HD will most likely be bottlenecking you the most.

 

I am going to go out on a limb NO. I am no expert on this but I think bus issues.

This is debatable I threw that in as a concession and avoid disagreement. Can the CPU be the problem yes, slow CPU, CPU intensive task, does that make it a bottleneck I say no just means you have slow computer. In plain English (not tech) bottleneck implies slowing other things down and a CPU that can't handle something is not slowing other things down so not a bottleneck. I will now go run and hide while you guys discuss.

 

LOL...I may be in the same boat as you, but I must say I disagree when calaveras said that the CPU can never be the bottleneck. Hardly is this the case. Usually in a system the slowest component isn't the cpu but if it is it is surely going to be slowing down your system. With a 7300 I wouldn't worry about it. But I also agree that the HD is usually what slows things down in HD intensive situations.

 

In a modern system, by far the fastest component is the CPU, which may be running at several billions of cycles per second. The RAM, which is very fast, high bandwidth, short term memory for a computer, is next on the list. The hard drive, being a mechanical component, is by far the slowest component of a modern system; seek times (the time required for the read/write heads to reach the desired data on the platter) are at least 4 milliseconds as opposed to the 2.5ms' response time of a generic RAM chip. A CPU is hundreds, maybe thousands of times faster than the second fastest part of the system, which is usually the RAM. I can't remember the statistics very well as they are not very important, but there are articles on this sort of topic, btw.

PS; in the case of your system (and most modern laptop systems, regardless of their configuration), the hard drive is definitely the slowest component. Even a Pentium 4, which is generations behind the Core 2 Duo, is faster than most high-end HDDs such as the 10k RPM Raptor (which has a seek time of 4.6ms btw)

 

RAM latency is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second) not milliseconds like HDD and is maybe 10,000 times faster than HDD.

 

Great replies!

So the HDD will almost always be the bottle-neck, and going from 4200 rpm to 5400 rpm to 7200 rpm to ??? Helps, but the HDD will remain the bottleneck... until they come out with something not mechanical.

Thx

 

Nope. Solid state hard drives are not mechanical. They are similar to a flash drive and have no moving parts.

 

You cant have just one bottleneck it depends on what your doing that will determin it.

If you were compressing a file into a .rar the cpu would be the bottleneck.

If you were playing a game, chances are with any modern system the video card will be the bottleneck.

RAM is just holding information for the system to use, its not actually processing anything like the cpu or gpu, its only real puprose is to temporarly replace the hdd as data storage. So when your playing a game and you need to load textures for the polygons on screen. It pulls it from the ram instead of from the hdd wich is much much faster.

If you have a lack of ram for your given task, what happens is called a page file, the computer will then read it off of the hdd instead of the ram wich in a game will usually cause a studder in gameplay or a pause. Your FSP wont really change thats the cpu/gpu side of things wich are actually processing the data, but it will make the game feel much slower or laggy.

Alot of things are stored to the HDD even if you have more ram than you need just due to how the program is designed, so thats why HDD speed is still very important (and all your game files, program files ect have to be read from hdd and so does all the data that goes to the ram)

So thats why the HDD is considered the slowest part of a notebook in general because they have slower than normal HDD's this has changed recently with high capacity HDDs (250gb) and also faster rpms 160gb+ 7200rpm drives.

Getting one of those will really help take care of your hdd speeds and make things run much faster.

 

If you game, you'll want to get the best dedicated GPU vs an integrated one. Something in the ATI X1600 and nVidia Go 7600 for older games and nVidia 8600M for the current games

RAM first before anything else. You want at least 1GB for XP is you don't game or multitask. If you do games or Multitask, you'll want 2GB. Vista, you want at least 2GB. The point is to avoid hitting the pagefile at all cost.

As for HD, as long as you have a modern 5400 rpm, you'll be OK, the performance difference between the 4200 and 5400 is dramatic but the difference between 5400 and 7200 while still noticable but much less so.

CPU is the last thing you'll have to worry about as long as you got a C2D.