Is L3 cache a really big deal?

[ExoMale]

picked up an old computer yesterday for £12.50 and it has a gigabyte AM3 board(thought it was AM2, but ddr3 makes it 3) which currently has an Athlon x 2 250 in it, Not doing anything yet, system is slow and having issues installing windows again, but I am thinking of upgrading the processor ideally to a quad, but below a phenom II and the phenom II 850 & 840 x 4 don't seem to have any L3, just L2, now I haven't properly looked at prices, but is L3 enough to get the quads that have it?

The psu is 300w and SFX, so likely wouldn't get any of the 125w quads anyways.

 

[pandem0nium]

1055T - x6, 95W. Plenty of room for a good OC with the bus.

 

[mistersprinkles]

The use of L2 vs L3 cache in some AMD chips is just an architectural decision by AMD and does not directly correlate to more or less performance. L3 cache didn't even exist at one point long ago in a galaxy far away. Don't concern yourself with it

 

[Martini1991]

Those phenom ii's are rebranded athlon ii's, which is why they don't have L3 Cache

 

[ExoMale]

Thanks for replies.

the cache never been a bother to me, I understand it, but my laptop I had only had a 2ghz pentium dual with 1mb L2 cache and wasn't too bad, but I plan to keep this system for longer and don't think once I sort windows out and put games on(need a dedicated gpu still) the Athlon x2 250 will cut it, I felt dual core intels better performers of this era, got 2gb ram earlier which I think I already had 2gb stick with it so depending on speeds i should have a decent performing 4gb of memory.


What are the Athlon II x 4 like compared to the phenom quads? 6 core be nice, but being this age I don't know how any of them would fair with Anno 2205 once i decide on gpu as this is the main game I want to play.

 

[ExoMale]

Gigabyte GA-M74GMT-S2

is the motherboard and on the cpu support list on their site, it says N/A under 'since bios' category for a lot of the phenom x3/4/6 so it would seem I'm limited to only certain ones I guess??? The 1055T 95w mentioned above seems to be listed as compatible, but not the 125w or any other 1055T verion(don't know how many there are)

 

[d_brennen]

Find a cheap 1055t