I3 L3 cache

[dazz]

How does the low 4MB L3 cache (compared to the 8MB of an I5 750) of an I3 affect it's performance, especially while gaming please?

I can see in single core benchmarks like cinebench that the difference is minimal clock for clock.

 

[Mr Krugga]

Well, consider the cache being used for two cores instead of 4 as in Core i5 750. That's a major difference, in multi-threaded apps it will count, in single threaded it won't.

 

[dazz]

I'm sorry I'm not sure I understand what you mean. 2 cores 4MB vs 4 cores 8MB... isn't it 2MB of cache available per core in both cases anyway?

anf if we're talking about a game not optimized to run on more than two cores, how much can I expect it to affect?

thanks for your help

 

[Mr Krugga]

It's a shared cache but the difference would be minimal anyway. Real world difference can be anything from 5-50% but I'd imagine most single or dual threaded games clock for clock would be faster by 15% on i5 750.

 

[dazz]

I could live with a 10 - 15% performance loss, especially if a higher OC can make up for the cache loss a bit (I think an I5 tops at 4GHz and an I3 at 4.3 4.4)

now 50%... that's a whole different story lol

thanks. very much appreciated

 

[Mr Krugga]

It really depends on a game, overclock, resolution and graphics card. CPUs aren't a limiting factor these days.

 

[dazz]

sorry, should have mentioned it's FSX what we're talking about here. It's heavily CPU bound