Question:
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?
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
supposing a T7300 cpu...
Could that cpu ever be the bottle-neck?
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
What about a Solid State Hard drive? Would that make the hard drive as fast as the ram?
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
What about a Solid State Hard drive? Would that make the hard drive as fast as the ram?
I am going to go out on a limb NO. I am no expert on this but I think bus issues.
Last edited by baddogboxer : Today at 05:10 PM. Reason: oversimplified for space CPU can be bottleneck also
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.
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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)
Answer:
Re: Bottle-neck
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.
RAM latency is measured in nanoseconds (billionths of a second) not milliseconds like HDD and is maybe 10,000 times faster than HDD.