Quote:
Originally Posted by sclitheroe
For 25% more on-die cache I would definitely spend the extra $100 - pretty much the single most important aspect of a modern CPU, to the point where I'd choose a CPU with more cache than a CPU with a higher clock speed every single time.
I also wouldn't categorically state that games don't use hyperthreading - if you inspect a running game in task manager for thread count, I bet many, many games utilize more than one thread. Even if a game did utilize few or no threads, the larger cache would be even more beneficial, since more of the data and instructions related to that single thread would occupy the cache.
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Very very few games on the market utilize hyper-threading, and even the ones that do utilize it have minimal benefit (like .5% at most). Synthetic benchmarks inflate the importance of HT because they do in fact use it for physics modeling, but real-world game tests show the benefit is marginal, and sometimes even has a negative impact on the final results.
Hundreds of benchmarks of the Gen 2 and Gen 3 i5/i7s have shown this same thing (i5-2500k vs i7-2600k or i5-3570k vs i7-3770k). This isn't even to mention that a 3770k runs hotter than the already hot 3570k, and consumes more power.
http://www.overclock.net/t/671977/hy...ading-in-games
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...k_6.html#sect0