Core 2 Duo processors... noticable differences?

Well as of a few hours ago I finally pulled the trigger and ordered a Compal HEL80 w/ 1GB of RAM (1-DIMM Corsair) and a 60GB 7200rpm HD.

I had a hard time deciding if it was worth it to pay an extra $100 for a Core 2 DUO 2.0GHz (T7200) Processor which has 4 MB L2 Cache. I eventually went with the Core 2 DUO 1.66GHz (T5500) Processor with 2 MB L2 Cache, but still have time to email the place and upgrade to a better processor.

The thing is, I have no idea if that 2MB L2 Cache is a bottleneck justifying an extra $100+ for the T7200? Not to mention the slightly lower clock speed.

I plan on using this computer primarily for some fairly complicated strategy gaming (Galactic Civilizations II-- at max settings), doing some moderately heavy calculating in very large spreadsheets, surfing the 'net and maybe burning some CDs.

How significant is the L2 cache? Can I make up for it later by adding another 1GB of Corsair RAM?

 

You should definitely upgrade.... I use a 2.33 ghx C2D and it is great!

 

Please gives facts, not "hey do this!". No, in everyday tasks you wont even notice a difference unless you jump from a 5500 to a 7600. You should only pay the extra if your going to do CPU intensive tasks such as encoding. Gaming might make it worthwhile too, not sure. But overall you were wise to save the money.

 

For normal use, it will not make much difference. System performance depends mainly on the amount of RAM and the type of GPU, if any.

 

For $100, though, my opinion is that you should have gone for it. The T7200 is what I'd call the "sweet spot" of the C2D lineup. Jetstar is right, but if you doing anything even remotely processor intensive, the T7200 would be better, and it would increase the resale value of your notebook if you ever decided to sell it.

Just my two cents.

 

Keep in mind that even though the T7200 has a 340MHz clockspeed advantage over the T5500, it won't matter the majority of the time because the Core 2 Duo, like the Core Duo, runs at 1.0GHz to save power and produce less heat. It will only jump to a higher clockspeed when needed. The doubled cache does not make a tangible difference in most situations. In gaming, the bottleneck is your video card and not your CPU, so upgrading the CPU won't do a whole lot.

So no, it is probably not worth the $100. That is not a bad upgrade price though.

 

Here's the rule of thumb that will always keep you doing your best:

"Buy the best possible computer with the best possible components when you can afford to do it."

If the T7200 is only $100 more, get it now, like, right now, while you can. If you don't, I can practically guarantee you a time will come in the near to near-distant future where you'll be saying to yourself: "I should have paid the $100 difference and got the better processor."

Between those two machines, you can expect to see a noticeable difference especially for the type of gaming you intend to do (based on what you mentioned). The 4MB of L2 will outperform the 2MB on the lower cost machine, so again it's a "Buy it if you can afford it" proposition.

Regrets are terrible things, so get the best you can and you'll never have to wonder "If I only..." or "I should have..."

Can't go wrong that way.

bb

 

Honestly, though, I'd rather have it there in case I needed it. For example, I just bought a Zune, and when I go to add videos to it, sometimes they need to be converted. Some of them are pretty big, and my current CPU (sig) leaves something to be desired. Up until now, I rarely had use for the full power of my CPU, but this can be downright annoying.

Maybe an isolated example, but an example nonetheless. I might also be a bad candidate to take advice from this on, I plan on upgrading my current laptop to a T7200 in the near future,

 

Video encoding is one of the few situations where you definitely will notice a significant improvement from the T7200's 4MB L2 cache. I'm going to hazard a guess that you may also see a reasonable improvement in your Excel performance. Both applications involve repeated operations on relatively small data-sets.

For gaming and most day to day operations, you'll be hard pressed to notice the difference.

 

Ah just want to point out that Oblivion and other CPU intensive games will benefit from the T7200. You will notice roughly a 5% to 10% difference in frame rates, especially in areas filled with NPC's.

 

Hmm, let's see...

GalCiv 2 runs pretty well on any CPU, so we can probably eliminate this.
Surfing the web requires nothing from the CPU either, and burning CD's is basically the same (Only "requirement" there is that dualcore might be a good idea if you run other CPU-heavy tasks at the same time. But since both cpu's are dualcore to begin with, that doesn't really mean anything either)

That leaves spreadsheet calculations.
How significant is the difference going to be there...

I've never worked with big spreadsheets, so I'm not 100% certain exactly how these calculations stress the system, but I'd assume the following:
We have a table full of data we need to run through. For a big spreadsheet, the dataset we're working on is probably some 200KB-2MB. And many operations only deal with a small subset of the data, often somewhat localized in one part of the spreadsheet (say, rows 1-500, rather than something scattered like 1-3, 5000-5004 and 63236-63243)

Presumably, we also have a relatively small amount of actual logic that has to be performed (sums, averages, mathematical formulas), but which is probably implemented pretty inefficiently (because the formulas have to be userdefined rather than hardcoded).

If the above isn't entirely inaccurate, I'd say go for the bigger cache. Sounds to me like a textbook case of "where cache is useful".

Not really. More RAM will definitely help you if you work with more than 1GB data at a time. Without that extra GB, the system will have to use the pagefile, which is sloooow. But as long as there's enough available RAM, buying more won't make a difference.
Cache, on the other hand won't help if you run out of RAM. Then the pagefile still has to be used, which is still sloooow. But if that doesn't become a problem, the cache helps simply by keeping the most used data closer to the CPU so it can be retrieved faster when needed.

I can't give you any numbers for how much it'll help in your particular case, but I'd assume the bigger cache would give you enough of a speed boost to be worth it. (At least for the spreadsheet part. As I said, the other tasks you mentioned aren't really dependant on a fast CPU or big cache)

So yeah, I agree with TedJ

 

Spreadsheet calculations won't be affected more than the standard ~5-10% difference between a Core 2 a Core processor at the same clock speed. Spreadsheets (especially the common ones, like Excel) are still very single-threaded, and load up a lot of data fairly inefficiently, so you won't see a performance jump from the dual cores or an increased cache, except that you'll still be able to use your computer to surf the web or something while the calculations run. But the Core and Core 2 will show their same across the board difference. More RAM is definitely the best for performance, though, especially if they're large spreadsheets as well as complex. I have a half-meg spreadsheet loaded now, and Excel takes 27MB of RAM. I open a 50MB file, and it shoots up to 155MB. Just opening it, not even doing processing. If a Core Duo fits more in your price range, it will not disappoint you. Just make sure you get 2GB of RAM if you're working with large data sets... I have a gig at the office on a single-core 2GHz Pentium M, and I strain it quite often, but it's primarily running out of RAM, not out of processing resources.

 

Singlethreaded, yeah, but inefficient loading of data doesn't neccesarily mean less performance gain from a larger cache. On the contrary, it might mean bigger savings (because random accesses to cache is a hell of a lot cheaper than random accesses to RAM. Sequential RAM accesses are much cheaper, which reduces the need for cache)

Depends on how large datasets it operates on though. As a rough guideline I'd go by the file size rather than Excel's overall memory consumption (Excel loads a ton of stuff into memory, but all the operations it performs are centered around the small chunk representing the file data, so if there's room for (a decent fraction of) the file in cache, it should be able to make a difference. If we're talking about 500MB of data, then the cache might not make much of a difference. On a 50MB file or smaller, I'd expect to see an improvement though.