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From what I understand, to get a really good performance from a laptop on heavy tasks such as video rendering, fast boot time and accessibility, you would want

  • an i7 CPU,
  • a lot of RAM, and
  • a fat Solid State Drive.

I can't imagine a system that would run faster.

My questing is: If I get a computer with Gen4 i7, 16GB RAM and 1TB 5400rpm HDD, would the slow HDD hold back the CPU and Memory from really reaching full potential ? Is there any point in investing in such a machine when it has such a crappy HDD ?

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You would still have pretty good performance, since you have ample RAM a lot of applications would happily live in memory so the drive would do very little paging compared to the equivalent system with 4GB memory.

You will not have a substantially fast boot, CPU and memory play almost no part in affecting boot time, here the drive will be a bottleneck, if you need the space I would say upgrade the drive to a 7200 RPM drive, that will be a bit faster and probably still cheaper then an SSD.

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    Or may consider Hybrid Drives as they are getting cheaper
    – Darius
    Commented Dec 26, 2013 at 9:55
  • +1 Hybrid drives are indeed nice if boot time matters and their price is quite acceptable if you need a large drive.
    – Hennes
    Commented Dec 28, 2013 at 13:25
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From what I understand, to get a really good performance from a laptop on heavy tasks such as video rendering, fast boot time and accessibility, you would want

I am not sure how accessibility fits in here

an i7 CPU,

Uhm, no. I think you want to write 'a fast CPU' or 'a powerful CPU'.

A core i7 is not per definition one of these. I7's are usually the top of the line of the consumer CPU for their generation. A modern i3 will outperform an ancient i7 though. Do not just focues on the name. Check out chip design, number of cores, clock speed etc etc instead and match that to your desired goals.

E.g. a relative slow 2.0 GHz 4 core CPU might well outperform a dual core 3.0GHZ CPU on tasks such as video transcoding, yet be slower on single treaded tasks.

a lot of RAM, and

RAM almost always helps for just about any task.

a fat Solid State Drive.

Not sure why a fat SSD. But SSDs in geneneral help a lot. Both for storing the OS and programs (which you can do fine on a small 40-60GIb-ish SSD) and for data. For video rendering, transcoding or similar large files it can get expensive though.

I can't imagine a system that would run faster.

My questing is: If I get a computer with Gen4 i7, 16GB RAM and 1TB 5400rpm HDD, would the slow HDD hold back the CPU and Memory from really reaching full potential ?

It depends on the tasks. If you just want to play a movie. No. the HDD will be fine.

For IO intensive tasks a SSD or a faster disk (or a pair of HDD) will be better.

Is there any point in investing in such a machine when it has such a crappy HDD ?

Why not. HDDs are replaceable at a later time. And just because a DD is 5400 does not mean it is crappy. A modern 5400 RPM HDD can (and often will) be a lot faster than a few year old 7200RPM drive.

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  • Thank you for the detailed, derisive reply. Since I am buying from Dell with an extended warranty, playing around with their system and replacing the drive would void that warranty.
    – toms
    Commented Dec 26, 2013 at 10:40
  • I also have Dells (R300 and D630 and E6500). The first thing to do with any Dell is to reinstall the OS to get rid of bloatware. And they never gave me problem for user replaceable parts such as RAM or drives.
    – Hennes
    Commented Dec 26, 2013 at 12:24

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