800mhz ram on the powerbook?

Yeah, I'd be really pissed if I bought the Powerbook G4 and they came out with the Powerbook G5 two weeks down the road .

the powerbook is like 3 years old. You mean macbook pro. the current model has 800mhz ram. The previous model had 667mhz ram. The next model will have 1066mhz ram.

No the current MB and MBP use PC5300 667mhz RAM. The iMac and Mac Pro are the only 800mhz at present. The next MBP will use 800mhz.

MBP = Macbook Pro (current)
PB = Powerbook (pre-2006)

let me rephrase. I AM DUMB.

yes, the next generation will have 800mhz ram like the most recent imac.

The performance increase from 667 MHz DDR2 to 800 MHz DDR 2 will be minimal. The MacBook Pros are not starved for bandwidth, I don't understand why you think an 800 MHz memory subsystem is going to make all the difference..... especially when memory is only a small portion of system performance, and 20% increase in a given component's speed something that affects system speed maybe 5-15% on average is still a small increase.

Again, given the MacBook Pro isn't starved for bandwidth, it's a good bet there will be no performance benefit.

Barefeats ran 667 MHz RAM in the Mac Pros, and their results were interesting.... real-world performance yielded no slow-downs by using the 667 MHz modules vs. the 800 MHz ones. And that's in he Pros, with 8 cores clocked 50% higher.

If you like the black and white screen, you'll be right at home during Mac OS X's startup if you hit apple+V as it starts for Verbose mode which shows you what the Unix core is doing as it starts

As for showing you what I mean, well, barefeats did a test here: http://barefeats.com/harper5.html

The bottom three in the test are the real-world tests that matter.. those on top are synthetic which are more indicative of theoretical performance increases, but which don't pan out in real use.... even the synthetic benches don't show much, and that's mostly singling out memory performance.

Here is a comparison of memory latency in the MacBook Pro: http://barefeats.com/mbpp03.html

The difference is also minimal.

I'm afraid it's not possible to compare 667 vs. 800 in the MBP yet, since it doesn't yet support 800 MHz, but historically faster memory has made only slight improvements (unless they're huge jumps, of course); you could look at myriad tests over the years, from PC133-DDR266 to DDR3-1800 on sites like AnAndTech, FiringSquad and TomsHardware and you'll see the differences are really only for enthusiasts....

And I promise you you'd never yourself notice it, since a 10% increase (and it would be less than that) is not generally perceivable by humans.... picture something taking 60 seconds, vs. 54 seconds... could you tell which was faster? Probably not.

However, the next MacBook Pros will likely be faster due to faster chips and I suppose possibly a new architecture.... so if you're waiting for that, it might not be a bad idea.