T42 VS T43 Is the added bus speed actually worth it?????????

[semaj]

Is there a significant difference in speed between the 400 mhz bus speeds compared to the 533 bus speeds? I have heard the differences between the the t42 and the t43 but not personally. I previously had a t30, t41, t42p and now a t60p. I jumped the 533 bus speed increase since i went straight from 400 to 667 and cannot attest to the difference. While I am an IBM fan she is a fan of Toshiba. The Toshiba Tecra M2 and the Toshiba Tecra M3 closely compare to the t42 and t42 respectfully. Tecra is their business class laptops.

The processor speed is negligeable about the same speed for both laptops we are looking at on eBay. She will most likely be using the laptop for light java games, outlook email, office apps, dvd burning(external usb). Maybe light video compression but that is just with the dvd burning, downloading, and listening to music.

The price difference is roughly 150-200 $ difference. Maybe 100 or so mhz faster processor speed, and 20 gig more hdd or not, and faster ram since faster bus speed, and most noteable is the 533 bus speed compared to the 400. Everything else would be the same.(500-700$).

400mhz bus or 533?

Thanks for the insight everyone.

[christopher_wolf]

Depends on what you do with it; if you are in the more serious lines of engineering and research and need something that can quickly pop open various CAD and FEA programs quickly, then I would say that it is worth it. In addition, it does give one a slight edge when it comes to decreasing time-to-completion for large meshes. I benched my T43 against a similar T42p for a pacemaker seal mesh and the T43, clean, could come in at 30 seconds, across various runs, ahead of the T42 with the same memory and nearly the same CPU clock at all times. For initial runtime of any program it shaves a little off startup and overhead. For compiling? More of a gain.

I haven't noticed too much of a difference when it comes to some multimedia tasks, such as burning DVDs, and I really don't think Java is going to benefit from the 400-533 delta much at all.