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Laptop Computers Showdown: Pentium Upsets Turion X2?
The Front Side Bus (FSB) peak memory speed number, for instance, is measured in three places- the CPU chip, the memory controller on the motherboard, and the actual memory. The slowest point determines the effective FSB speed. To make things even more confusing, a dual channel memory can deliver that speed using matched pairs of slower, more economical memory sticks, and the third memory channel available on some high end mobos does little for most real people. Hard drives would appear to limit performance, since they always seem to spin at 5,400 rpm. Rotation speed determines how fast the drive can transfer information to and from the much faster system ram memory, where it's actually used. Like memory subsystems, mass storage subsystems can double their effective speed by using a matched pair of drives, in an arrangement known as RAID0, which must be supported by the motherboard for it to work. So, how did the Pentium SU2700 in my wife's Acer Aspire 4810TZ-4011 notebook whoop my Toshiba Satellite P505D laptop computer's Turion X2 RM-70 eight ways to Sunday? In the system design strategy, of course. Both systems ran 32 bit Vista Home Premium, so the culprit wasn't a bloated operating system using excessive computing power. In a nutshell, the Toshiba was designed to impress with specifications that suggested a respectable amount of brawn. The Acer was designed for an eight hour battery life, which we haven't confirmed yet. Since the AMD road warrior wasn't designed for low power, the system engineers tried to slow the disk to a minimal speed any time it could. This meant that almost any movement of the cursor would fire up the disk and system fan, which actually reduced battery life. And this was in high performance mode, not one of the power-saver profiles. Meanwhile, back at the Acer, it eventually dawned on me that this machine was booting faster, running almost silently, and not blowing hot air on my left hand. We don't watch the battery meter. The machine is far more portable, and the smaller screen is not the hindrance that I was expecting based on a single number. If I had to base my buying decision on one number, it would be the CPU chip's Thermal Design Point. Measured in watts, the TDP is an accurate measure of how hard that CPU is going to whack the battery. Since no circuit is 100 percent efficient, wasted energy shows up as heat, which the system must dispose of, usually with a fan that draws even more battery power. TDPs for these two CPUs are 31 watts for the AMD Turion X2 RM-70 vs. 10 watts for the Intel Pentium SU2700.
Laptop computers and components, like their desktop counterparts, are marketed on the basis of specifications that actually mean nothing when used alone or without several other specifications.
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