Which Intel Chip is faster?

[norsemagni]

Which Intel Chip is faster? 3.6 ghz with 1 mb of cache or 3.0 ghz chip with 2 mb of cache?

 

[Eva_Unit_0]

The 3.6 will hands down be faster. In all honesty the extra 1mb of L2 hardly affects performance at all since the latency is also higher on it as well (an inherent quality...more cache = more time to search for data using the same algorithm). However, it should be noted that the 2mb chip will most likely be a newer stepping with some newer features than the 1mb chip (only a few 5xx chips had EIST, NX-bit and EMT64 while every 6xx does).

 

[gwai lo]

Cache doesn't offer a huge performance impact currently, and with the Intel architecture, raw mhz will do more good.

edit: blah..school network sucks -__- too slow

 

[norsemagni]

Thanks for the info. Alienware is trying to screw with me.

 

[UltimaParadox]

Yeah definetly go with the 3.6, even though in most cases more cache is better, the performance increase is negligble when you are getting up to 1mb and 2mbs compared to 128 and 256.

 

[dexvx]

No, the primary reason 2MB cache offers an insignificant performance boost is because it is higher latency cache.

 

[wee96]

3.6 in basically every sense.

 

[norsemagni]

Thanks everybody, looks like I may have to post my service issues with Alienware, it's a doozy.

 

[gwai lo]

No, the primary reason 2MB cache offers an insignificant performance boost is because it is higher latency cache.

I was mostly talking about the diminishing returns thing...but that works too.

 

[mrgstiffler]

I'm assuming the 3.0 with 2MB cache is a 630J. If so, it will most likely overclock to at least 3.6-3.8GHz