Which component is the bottleneck?

I'm looking to buy a notebook, and everyone says that you really don't need more than an i5 and 4gb RAM. If a laptop has an i5-430, 4gb RAM, 500gb 7200 RPM HDD, and an ATI HD 5730 gpu, which component will be bottlenecking it? And I'm sure it differs for what I'm using it for, but for general intense multi-tasking with stuff like a bunch of browsers, antivirus, Photoshop, and so on.
And will upgrading to an i7 and 8gb RAM make a big difference on making it faster overall? Or will keeping an i5 and 4gb and just upgrading to a SSD be faster, if the HDD is bottlenecking it?

 

For the most part, the bottleneck is probably going to be your brain. Depending on what you're doing in Photoshop you will probably see CPU bottlenecking, though. Mind you, Photoshop also makes good use of the GPU nowadays, and in that case the GPU will be the bottleneck, although GPUs are still much faster than CPUs for this kind of task.

As for the HDD, well, an SSD will probably give you the most noticeable improvement in performance, but that doesn't mean that the HDD is a bottleneck the entire time. Applications will load faster, but a lot of the time the HDD won't be in too much demand.

 

Cpu is the bottleneck for cpu intensive tasks such as video encoding.

For multitasking and regular office use even the lowly i3 will never come close to full utilization.

Ram is the bottleneck for loading multiple large datasets at the same time, and we're talking open 100s of documents or pictures and host a production database server at the same time large.

For office use 2 gb is enough, 3 is better, 4 is not noticeably better than 3 and you'll likely never need more in the life of this notebook


Hard disk access speed is the bottleneck when reading or writing data to disc such as starting up an application, starting windows etc.

An ssd would decrease load times, so would raid.

Gpu is the bottleneck for rendering games, cad models etc. You have one of the best available mobile cards on the market, it will suffice for longer than your notebook will survive.

 

I would choose SSD and regard HDD as the bottleneck.

 

The slowest part of any computer is the user sitting in front of it.
I'd take a look into the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid hard drive.
Small SSD + large HDD = goodness

 

Ok, thanks for all the help. I'm used to using old crappy laptops with 1GB RAM and Pentium processors, so I really don't know what the newer laptops can handle right now. It seems like it's going to be a lot faster than what I expected, which is great.

 

Yeah, starting with the first Core Duos, hardware innovation began to outpace software innovation. Back in the Pentium 4 days, it wasn't really that hard to get Office Apps to top out the CPU.

Nowadays, it is rare. If anything, I'd spend the extra money on an SSD, extra battery, extra adapter or anything to save yourself time outside of computing power.

For example, I have a bag with an extra adapter, an extra laptop battery, and an extra cellphone battery. These will save me more time in the lifetime of my computer than an SSD will. It is just grab and go every morning.

 

Are SSD/HDD Hybrid drives any good, read this Hybrid drive - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. It's left me a bit unclear about the drives .. Say if the drive is 500gb but has 4gb SSD memory like this ( Buy 500GB Seagate Momentus XT SSD/HDD Combo DriveST95005620AS from CCL - Online Retailer of the Year 2008, 2007 & 2006 for laptops, desktops and computer hardware) does that mean it isn't very efficient if your going to be using programs larger than 4gb in size, as it will have to keep spinning up and down the hard drive all the time, meaning you have to wait for it ?

Ta, Tom.

 

I'm gonna defer to AnandTech for this one.

 

Refer the Anandtech article link, as suggested by TehSuigi. Basically, it doesn't even come close to an SSD in some situations, but especially with repeated use, in best-case situation, it comes damn close!!(Since 4-k random reads outnumber random-writes,by 40 to 1, for most situations you will notice a remarkable improvement from normal hard disks).

Didn't get what you meant by programs larger than 4gb in size, do u mean 64-bit applications (say Photoshop CS5) which can use much more than 4 GB ram? Anyway, the hard drive won't be idle for long in most situations(as the 4 GB is only for reads, many situations will require writes to the drive), but you won't probably see a performance hit.( It should still perform similar to a 7.2k in worst-case)

 

It's TehSuigi, an intentional misspelling of "The," not Tech.

 

Sorry, I was in a hurry. Fixed now. Generally, when referring to any other peson, I make sure that I've got the name right.