Clevo m570ru hard drive and ram question.

I stumbled across some divergent informations about the M570ru the other day. On the web site of PC microworks, they offer the M570ru with a hard drive sata 300 and 800 mhz ram but on every other web site, the specs for the M570ru says it's limited to sata 150 and 667 mhz ram...
Other treads state that the M570ru will just down clock it's ram to 667 if you use 800 mhz, so my question about this would be why Pc microworks would offer such a part that costs more money if the computer cannot use it...
My other question is about the hard drive. Correct me if I am wrong but the sata 300 means a faster data transfer rate. So if the specs of the M570ru are really at sata 150 maximum will it just down clock (term?) again to sata 150? Again if this is the case I do not understand why Pc microworks would sell such a part on this model...

 

hmmm good question

 

One word:
-Profit.

 

Either PC Microworks want to offer every option that 'works' even at clocked down speeds, they don't want the questions of 'can you sell m 800mhz ram and have to go into a discussion', or they don't want to limit your choice as a consumer just because 'they know best' or they are stupid or ....

they aren't the only company that offers 800hz ram...

Nope you're wrong, sata 300 means the top speed is theoretically twice the seed of sata 150, not that you will have twice the speed off the platters. But even the fastest HD's out there barely hit 100MB/s so don't worry about it, makes no difference apart from when access the cache on the disk, which some people would say is important.

Nox

 

but it support the sata300 or not?

 

I don't believe the M570RU can use SATA300. The D901C can but its a moot point atm. No notebook HDD's can even get close to 150 mb/s not to mention 300 mb/s. SATA150 is fine for now.

The M570RU cannot make use of the 800Mhz ram. It will downclock it to 667Mhz. PcMicro isn't the only one to offer this but to me it's snakeoil. Don't go for the option, unless it's free that is. Then by all means get it.

 

The M570RU is only SATA 150 capable.
And the max RAM speed is 667Mhz. Everyone selling them for more than those values are making a good profit for no increase in performance.

 

Actually the Clevo M570RU is SATA II 300 capable, but as Wu Jen says there isn't a great deal of difference in the performance. However if you want absolutely the fastest you will want SATA II.

The Intel 965 chipset for laptops will only support 667MHz memory even though the FSB is 800MHz, so anyone selling 800MHz memory in any laptop with the Intel 965 laptop chipset is just trying to market in a rather deceitful manner (i.e. 'snakeoil'). See: http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/PM965/index.htm

The desktop Intel 965 chipset does support 800MHz memory so you will find it in the Sager NP 9261/62.

 

For myself ill get a sata300... anyway its just 20$ more

 

And SATA300 HDDs are faster.

 

Donald that is odd. When I talked to XoticPc, mainly Justin, on live chat, he told me that it`s only sata150 capable.
Also an email from Sager told me the same thing. Now this was when the 5790 was out. So is the 5791 the one that supports the 300 version ? I thought that the (1) version improvement over the (0) was the Turbo Memory and support for extreme cpus...

 

All Sager models are capable of supporting SATA II (300) hard drives.

However due to supply issues Sager has chosen to not promise that SATA II hard drives will be installed other than the 160GB 7,200 RPM hard drive in the Sager NP9262.

 

eleron911 you're right. They only work at SATA1 speed, but it's best you get SATA2 HDDs since they're a little faster. You will feel the difference when transferring files within your HDD (reading, writing).

 

math, physics and benchmarks say no. today's sata drives are hampered by rotational speed and other internal issues, not the external interface.

when you are transferring within the hard drive, the external interface is more or less irrelevant.

the only time you might notice a difference is when your system is retrieving data from the cache, but i have yet to meet anyone who can truly tell me they see measurable, real-world differences between sata i & ii drives.

 

Ah, what the heck have I said to be wrong?

 

"You will feel the difference when transferring files within your HDD (reading, writing)"

i would suspect you are feeling the placebo affect

 

No, I'm right.
SATA2 HDDs are faster than SATA1 and mostly because you can't find the same HDD in SATA1 and SATA2 versions. The 16MB SATA2 Seagate is faster than the 8MB SATA1 version (just an example).

 

Unfortunately, the question of whether a particular system will "support" SATA/300 is not the same as whether that system can take advantage of the full capabilities of a SATA/300 device.

As discussed more thoroughly on the SATA standards website: http://www.sata-io.org/ , and in this wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#Backward_and_forward_compatibility , the SATA standard was designed with backward (and forward compatibility) in mind, thus, a SATA/150-compliant system should be able to "support" both SATA/150 and SATA/300 devices; however, that "support" is achieved using a speed autonegotiation protocol pursuant to which a SATA/300 device will reduce its native operating speed to the operating speed of a SATA/150-compliant device. By and large this speed autonegotiation is reported to work (see the wiki article); however, there were some southbridge chipsets produced in 2003 that would not support a SATA/300 device because they did not properly implement the speed autonegotiation protocol (the wiki article lists affected chipsets).

Thus, the mere fact that a particular system is advertised as "supporting" SATA/300 is not particularly useful, since it tells you nothing about whether or not the system will operate at the native SATA/300 speeds, or whether an attached SATA/300 device will just drop its operating speed down to SATA/150. In order to determine whether or not a system that is advertised as "supporting" SATA/300, you need to dig a little deeper.

With respect to the M570RU, it should be able to support a SATA/300 device at native speeds since it is built on the Intel PM965+ICH8M chipset which, according to the datasheet from Intel, has SATA registers that are used to determine the highest speed allowed on the SATA interface. On page 560 of the datasheet, under the bit description of the SATA control register, under the description for bits 7:4, the datasheet states that "ICH8 Supports Generation 1 communication rates (1.5 Gb/sec) and Gen 2 rates
(3.0 Gb/s)."

So, unless Clevo has gelded the SATA support of the Intel chipset it used to build the M570RU, it should be the case that the M570RU supports SATA/300 hdds running at the native speed of 3.0 Gb/s (although no system ever reaches that theoretical maximum due to other system constraints) (also, no guarantees; remember, not even Clevo can guarantee everything about its hardware :wink: ).

 

You read 560 pages?
SATA2 is useless anyway, so overrated. But SATA2 gen. HDDs are fast.

 

please read carefully . . .

today's sata drives are hampered by rotational speed and other internal issues, not the external interface.

your statement is a generalization which applies only in certain situations where the internal mechanics of a sata 2 drive are more efficient than a sata 1 drive. my main point was simply that the sata interface itself doesn't really contribute to any speed increase.

16mb cache will help in certain situations, but again, that has nothing to do with the sata interface itself, which is what my point was.

my old 10,000 rpm sata i drive will crush any sata ii on the market today.

 

Yes, completely true. I never said that they're faster because of the interface, just only that they are faster on SATA2 (manufacturer's fault).
And by the way, Tom's Hardware doesn't really believe in your 10,000 RPM HDD. But it's weird that their 150GB model (which is the fastest of the 10,000 RPM list) isn't faster than the rest.
I'd buy a 10,000RPM HDD + 2 * 500GB HDDs for my desktop. I'd really like that.

 

touche, i thought you were referring to the interface.

however, that being said, the real-world performance difference is still not that great. the only real 'magic' sata ii offers over sata i is ncq, which is useful primarily in server-type environments. yes, its easier to get a sata ii drive with a large cache, but in the real-world that doesn't always equal noticeably better performance.

consider tom's benchmark is for writes, where cache can play a large role -- and its an artificial benchmark which is not indicative of the results you'll typically see in 'real-world' usage. i can verify this in a real-world scenario:

at my job we run a very large mail server farm comprised of a mix systems with sata i and sata ii drives. its an extremely read-and-write intensive environment performing tens of millions of read-write transactions per day. they are absolutely hammered, day and night. there is essentially zero performance difference between the two types of systems and they are bottlenecked purely at the disk level.

the primary limiting factor in the real world is the fact that the disks spin at 7200rpm, unless your disk is able to circumvent the laws of math.