Pentium M Processor 745 vs Pentium M 1.7 GHz

For a $150 differance, is the 745 chip worth it? I'm also trying to factor in if it is worth it when considering which hard drive speed to get 7200 or 5400. Will the 745 chip be worth it if i get the 7200 rpm HD? Same question if i got the 5400 rpm HD? Thanks again

 

Hi Nick,
I'm not sure how much of an increase the CPU would make, a close estimate would be a 10% increase. 6 percent for the inceased CPU speed itself and another 4% for the 2MB cache vs the 1MB cache. As far as the hard drive goes I can tell you for fact, having worked for Maxtor for 10 years a good part of it benchmarking drives, that there is a hugh performance increase going from a 5400 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm. Anyone who says they don't notice much difference is not very observant or maybe does nothing but surf the net. The increase rotational speed won't help surfing the net, but anything that requires disk access will have a nearly 33% increase in speed when going from a 5400 to a 7200. This means windows will load almost 33% faster, programs will load and start to execute 33% faster. It will be this way for a reads and writes to the drive. General CPU benchmarks won't show a 33% increase because it does not make the CPU any faster, any number crunching goes at the same pace just disk I/O has a 33% speed increase.

For the most bang for the buck, upgrade to a 7200 rpm drive, it's like feeding your notebook steroids and going from a 4200 to a 7200 is even more dramatic.

Jack

 

The 745 chip is 1.80ghz with a two mb cache.

I do not think it would be worth it, but I do not know from experience.

I have read that the 5400rpm is a great improvment over the 4200rpm.
I have also heard that the 7200rpm is a great improvment over the 5400rpm. I have also heard that between 5400 and 7200 is not that noticeable.

Check these link out:
http://www.tomshardware.com/mobile/20040510/index.html
http://www.notebookreview.com/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=112

 

A better test would be the 735 versus 1.7 ghz pentium m. The only differences then would be the core architecture and the cache size.
Going off of logic, however, shouldnt the difference be similar to a pent.4 versus a pent.4 EE?

 

sorry for the double post

Jack is right on the money, hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in any system, no matter how fast they are. Compared to RAM, hard drives are extremely slow, so slow that their performance is measured in milliseconds as opposed to nanoseconds. That is why they are the system's last resort to retrieving data (first being l1 cache). One of the most critical things in fine-tuning a system is removing the bottlenecks.
If you want battery life, however, opt for more ram. The less you have to spin the hard drive the more battery life you get.