I'm thinking of a new laptop to replace my current machine. I notice a lot of machines have the P8xx and T9xxx Intel Core 2 Duo. The T9xxx have a premium but they have I believe 6 megs of cache compared to the 3 megs in the P8xx. Will this help me for compilation times or any other stat? Should I invest the premium in more RAM than the cache?
I do a lot of Web work in Visual Studio 2008, some C++/MFC. I just want to balance my budget around my needs without overkill. Thanks.
Usually that's not as helpful as increasing the number of CPU cores (which can run parallel build if you don't have one-by-one dependency tree) or the speed of CPU itself - but the result may still vary by your real project to work with.
I don't know if more cache will help. It can't hurt I imagine. There are a couple things that helped my Visual Studio performance.
Put as much RAM in your system as possible. RAM is cheap, you should max out your machine.
Go to your power options, and make sure you CPU is running full speed. For instance, on my machine, with Vista installed, switching the power options from "Balanced" to "High performance" roughly double the speed for compiles.