Athlon 64 Newcastle, good?

[silencer534]

Is the Athlon 64 Newcastle chips good enough? I was looking through and saw that there is a ClawHammer core with 1MB L2 Cache, how big is the performance difference? Its going to be used for a gaming rig

 

[Avalon]

You shouldn't notice much of any difference between 1mb L2 cache and 512kb L2 cache if you're gaming. We're talking maybe a couple frames here. Check out some Anand articles on the 3400+, 3200+, and 3000+. You'll see what I mean. Hope this helps.

 

[JBT]

Also the ones with 512K Cache get a mhz bump of 200 so the difference in negligible.

 

[Shimmishim]

testing I did

both are at 2.0 ghz

you can see that there is not a lot of difference between the two...

the extra cache helps as the cpu scales to higher speeds for video encoding.