the diff. between 2 mb and 4 mb of cache

[wolfman140]

Hey guys,
unfortunately, when I ordered my Conroe from TigerDirect, I must've been excited or something because I orderd the E6400 when I MEANT to order the E6600!!! ARG! OK so the Ghz isn't that big of a deal because OC'ing will take care of that (2.13 Ghz compared to 2.4 Ghz)...But what about the 2 mb vs. 4 mb of cache?
I guess I should expect some dumbass answer of "it's double the memory!" . But besides that, what kind of performance increase do you think it offers? Is it enough difference to blow my face off or is it just sort of noticeable? I WOULD try and exchange it, but I'd probably have to pay shipping both ways, as well as a restocking fee on top of the extra $100 it costs.

 

[Robteam70]

Anand did a test on this, comparing equally clocked Conroes with 2 and 4 megs of cache. If I remember correctly, the benefit of having 4 megs varied from 0 to 10 percent depending on the application, but averaged only a 3.5 percent gain in performance overall.

 

[jaguarskx]

Here's two articles:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=4

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-e6300_2.html



The difference are mostly negligible unless you are talking about multimedia encoding. The extra 2MB gives DivX encoding a 10% boost, iTunes gets a 9.1% increase and WME9 encoding gets a 8.4% increase.

The performance increase for games is smaller. The biggest is in Quake of 6.7%, followed by Oblivion (Dungeon), and F.E.A.R. of 5.3%. Note, F.E.A.R. is from Xbitlab's. Anandtech and Xbitlab's test setups do not use exactly the same hardwares.

 

[tekzor]

Hey guys,
unfortunately, when I ordered my Conroe from TigerDirect, I must've been excited or something because I orderd the E6400 when I MEANT to order the E6600!!! ARG! OK so the Ghz isn't that big of a deal because OC'ing will take care of that (2.13 Ghz compared to 2.4 Ghz)...But what about the 2 mb vs. 4 mb of cache?
I guess I should expect some dumbass answer of "it's double the memory!" . But besides that, what kind of performance increase do you think it offers? Is it enough difference to blow my face off or is it just sort of noticeable? I WOULD try and exchange it, but I'd probably have to pay shipping both ways, as well as a restocking fee on top of the extra $100 it costs.

I think you still made a great choice. OC that baby and dont worry about the extra 2mb of cache and cash ZOMG PUN!! :!:

more cache dont always mean better perfomance. I dont know if extra 10min encoding(max) will bother you.

 

[wolfman140]

Hey guys thanks for all the info, you made me feel a lot better about my accidental-purchase! And I saved $100 so that works too. Yeah I'm hoping in combination with the new Asus P5W DH that OC'ing will be easy and productive.

 

[jaguarskx]

Larger caches decrease the miss rate when data/instruction is needed, the difference going from 512 to 1 meg (as in an AMD processor) is not huge, but the difference going from 512 to 2 meg (4-fold increase) is significant, going from 2 meg to 4 meg is not as significant-- however, with large workloads/data transfers it could make a difference in multitasking.

This would be a nice bench to see......

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any benchmarks that shows the effects on multi-tasking, therefore I don't want to speculate on that aspect.

But you are correct, that would be a nice benchie to see.