i5 2500K vs i7 2600K, does cache size matter?

[BladeVenom]

Look at the gaming benchmarks; the 2600k doesn't seem worth it. Once you overclock, I don't think you'd ever notice a difference.

 

[bryanW1995]

Think what you like but until i see the 2600k getting 20-30fps better I don't believe the extra cache makes 1 jot of difference in gaming. the I7 has 33% more cache compared to the I5. Where are the increased framerates to show that and im not talking 1-5fps

Wow, doesn't take much to get you to back off from an incorrect position. How about finding proof to back up your position?

 

[Blastman]

Over at THG they have CPU charts where they compared all the recent CPU architectures at 3.0Ghz on a single thread/single core performance. The extra cache on the i7 vs i5 makes maybe 1-2% difference at best the vast majority of the time. There are outliners like winrar that see 5% gain in speed, but that is the exception to the general trend which is a very small performance advantage.

So no, L3 cache size (6MB vs 8MB) is virtually irrelevant as far as performance goes. Hyperthreading (and the ability to process 8 threads instead of 4 at once) is the main difference in favor of the i7 over the i5 as far as performance goes. It will help in most video/audeo encoding situations.

In gaming, unless the game takes advantage of more than 4 cores/threads, you're unlikely to see much of any difference in performance between the i7/i5, and that is what the benchmarks generally show because few games really take advantage of > 4 cores.

Of the few exceptions, BF3 is one of them. In this test of BF3-multiplayer at the CPU limited setting of (medium 1920x1080), the i7-2600K was significantly (17%) faster than the i5-2500K. Even perhaps more important, the minimum framerate advantage for the i7 was 44% over the i5.