m4ttm4son Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 My gf needs a new laptop which she will be running lots of modelling programs (physics stuff) on that take hours to complete. Am I right in thinking an SSD will help speed them up and if so, has anyone heard any good/ bad things about the ones Dell offer to supply in their XPS laptops? I've been speccing up today and they want ~£200 to replace the stock 500GB 5400rpm for a 128GB SSD. With 4GB of RAM am I really going to see noticeable benefits or should this cash be spent on CPU power? Cheers for any insight. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cupramax Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 Vista wont use 4gb of ram so you're wasting you time on that, it can only adress 3gb and only then if you set the switch for that in the boot.ini file. As for SSD's affecting the performance it will only be relavent if the application she uses swaps to disk when running (ssd). If thats the case you'd be better buying the fastest processor and memory available. If it does use the disk then read/write will be way quicker on SSD than a standard disk. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazza_g Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 I thought that some of the graphics processors/cards available could make use of the spare RAM that Visa can't address so the 4gb wouldn't be a waste? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveP Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 the register (I think) had a test of SSD and the new velociraptor drives - the velociraptor (sp?) came out very well. SSD came out very well for random access. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chav Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 the register (I think) had a test of SSD and the new velociraptor drives - the velociraptor (sp?) came out very well. SSD came out very well for random access. hi dave, if its 200quid for a 128gb ssd it will be a slow one. better off overall with a velociraptor. a 128gb fast SSD (100MB/sec+ transfer guaranteeed) is about 800-1000 at the moment. we use these for development drives. very fast indeed. It transforms the machine. have development pcs, macs etc all fitted with mtron drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chav Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 My gf needs a new laptop which she will be running lots of modelling programs (physics stuff) on that take hours to complete. Am I right in thinking an SSD will help speed them up and if so, has anyone heard any good/ bad things about the ones Dell offer to supply in their XPS laptops? I've been speccing up today and they want ~£200 to replace the stock 500GB 5400rpm for a 128GB SSD. With 4GB of RAM am I really going to see noticeable benefits or should this cash be spent on CPU power? Cheers for any insight. with any laptop if you want real performance spend the money on graphics and harddisk not the cpu. the diff in speed between the very best and average is minimal. if you want real performance, ditch vista too. probably controversial on here saying that, but xp is significantly faster if setup right (SP3) its very unlikely any normal user will need >2gb ram unless they are editing very large photos. no point with movies as they are huge anyway and will never fit in ram. if you can, get a laptop with twin drives. have a system ssd (a fast one, not a samsung cheapo thing), and a big data drive like a velociraptor. xps laptops are crap value for money though. look at the graphics card you are buying - apart from that, they are standard laptops with additional gimmicks. if you are doing professional physics modelling, you need a desktop. the memory will run much faster (1600 DDR3), the professor will be much quicker (quad core 3ghz+), the graphics will be much faster. also physics increasingly uses the GPUs via cuda etc. you can do this on some nvidia laptops, but at a fraction of the speed as on a desktop. a decent workstation pc is only a grand or so. if the modelling is using huge datasets, you may not be able to afford the amount of ssd you need. hyperdrive is biggest volume or multi-drive raid setup of 128gb ssds. (up to 8-10 drives is quite cheap to setup) I'd consider a powerful desktop for the above requirements though. the laptop cpu wont make a difference - not enough cache and bus speed is slower. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m4ttm4son Posted September 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 Thanks guys, I knew I'd get the kinds of answers I need here Can you still get XP lappys? I thought everyone had to provide Vista now? The modelling is mainly code iterations, not pictures and graphics intensive, but would a good graphics card still be useful to process this stuff? I think the best route will be to push getting a desktop with a few HDDs and maybe try an SSD to test the difference. Otherwise it'll be back to letting the programs run overnight again and hope they don't frack up. will let you know how I get on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bullett Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 (edited) Isn't the 3gb limit on 32bit OS as I'm pretty sure you can run 4gb + in 64bit vista. If it's not graphics then a high power gpu is pretty pointless, multi core cpu + memory and hdd ftw. Why not go for a stripped RAID array for more performance? Do SSD not have a limited read/write life compared to normal drives? You can still get xp on netbooks but I think MS have stopped OEM's selling non vista unless it is a netbook. Edited September 22, 2008 by bullett Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 There is a description of the memory limits in my old blog here: Mac's Life: The 4Gb Memory Map Limit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mac Posted September 22, 2008 Report Share Posted September 22, 2008 Occured to me you may not have been that interested:roflmao: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
m4ttm4son Posted September 23, 2008 Author Report Share Posted September 23, 2008 Occured to me you may not have been that interested:roflmao: Actually, I hadn't heard of it until yesterday. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chav Posted September 23, 2008 Report Share Posted September 23, 2008 Can you still get XP lappys? I thought everyone had to provide Vista now? The modelling is mainly code iterations, not pictures and graphics intensive, but would a good graphics card still be useful to process this stuff? I think the best route will be to push getting a desktop with a few HDDs and maybe try an SSD to test the difference. Otherwise it'll be back to letting the programs run overnight again and hope they don't frack up. will let you know how I get on. The latest scientific software is starting to use GPUs from graphics card for highly parallel processing. Not sure if your G/f is using proprietary software or not. if not, it wont be using the GPUs yet, so main processor will be used. As its mainly code iterations, i dont think even an SSD will help. Would need to know more about the dataset requirements to give a better call on that. SSD will help mainly if accessing lots of small files repeatedly. XP often needs to be installed manually now. Also worth mentioning that if the software your g/f is running for the calculations has a 64bit version, it will be worth getting a desktop with 64bit xp/vista. the app will then be able to process memory twice as fast, but will need twice as much of it. no 3gb limit this way. 32gb is fine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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