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Old Mar 23, 2008 | 10:28 pm
  #29  
number_6
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Originally Posted by Iworkhere
Question guys, how critical is the difference between 533 system bus and 1600? Is 533 even worth looking at? I've seen a couple laptops with low ... stats, and was curious. Is it at such a high rate that the difference isn't AS noticable for something with that high of a disparity? Thanks.
Zero impact for most people. Typical laptop apps simply dont use that much memory bandwidth, so all you get is more idle time. In fact the major reason for a higher bus speed is the graphics card -- which are not available even on the high end laptops (until you get to the USD 5K+ workstations).

I once configured a laptop with single channel (instead of dual channel), cutting the memory bandwidth in half (so same as cutting the bus speed in half). Knew this would hurt performance, so benchmarked it extensively. Net was 1% drop in memory intensive workload (and 0% for others). So it is check-box marketing and not a useful feature for most laptops. But those bus numbers sure look impressive.
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