Which would perform better?/plus blu ray Ques

As the title says, which of these machines with the following specs perform better -
2.0 GHz Santa Rosa, 4.0MB Cache, 4200 RPM hard disk.

OR

1.8 GHz Santa Rosa, 2.0MB Cache, 5400 RPM hard disk.

Finally, is a blu ray drive a good feature to have? I'm not really planning to watch blu ray DVD's but is there any other reason to have one?

Thanks, jam.

 

2.0 GHz Santa Rosa, 4.0MB Cache, 4200 RPM hard disk

 

the 2GHz with 4MB cache is indeed the better option

BR is for movies
maybe one day software will appear on it, but i do't think that's going to happen before the HDDVD vs BR war is over

 

I'm going to offer a contrary perspective.

Hard Drives are by far the largest bottleneck in laptops (and desktops). While the 2ghz/4mb CPU is faster than the 1.8ghz/2mb, you will only notice the extra speed on high demand applications. But with the faster Hard Drive, you will notice the increased disk performance on almost everything you do.

I'd go with the faster Hard Drive.

 

I would agree the hard drive will be a larger performance limiter than the CPU, but the hard drive is much easier to upgrade.

If you don't plan to watch movies, the only reason to get a Blu-Ray drive would be if you back up large amounts of data as Blu-Ray discs can much more data.

 

I agree. The faster hard drive will give you the most notable performance bump, not a slightly faster processor.

So I say go with the faster hard drive, in agreement with Monk.

 

it's not the CPU speed that matters, it's the cache!
and you'll only notice increased speed whe you're loadig things, or when you do video encoding/decoding/recording

 

I think the question is loaded, and there is no correct “general” answer, what do you plan to do? With that said I like the faster HDD for the reasons stated. But, the 2Ghz is 10% faster in clocks and the extra cache is another 10% increase in CPU intensive tasks, and HDD are easier to upgrade.

I have heard some of those 200GB 4200 HDD are not that slow.

Blue Ray, aren't those over $500?

 

I just reviewed the Toshiba A215 with the 250GB 4200RPM drive. While not as slow as drives of yore, it was noticeably slower. Depends on what you are doing. Internet and office aren't that CPU intensive.

 

I'd say go with the faster CPU and upgrade the hard drive yourself. You can't upgrade CPU's after all.

 

of course you can
it's just a bit harder