P8600 vs T9400

Two choices:
- Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor P8600 (2.40GHz 1066MHz 3MBL2) 25W
- Intel® Core™ 2 Duo processor T9400 (2.53GHz 1066MHz 6MBL2) 35W

I know that the T9400 will add heat + reduce battery life, so how necessary is it to have 6MB cache instead of 3MB cache (in terms of gaming)

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cache-size-matter,1709.html

P8600/P8400 have more than enough power, and will not be a bottleneck in gaming. (And the heat/battery life difference between the 2 CPUs will be negligible unless they are made to run at full load.)

 

I can tell you this....in most cases....graphic card is the bottleneck for gaming performance....so P8400 or P8600 should handle latest games easily with good graphic card...I would go with the P8400 which is the cheapest (P8600 vs P8400 would not show much difference)....the size of the cache (according to some people) offers only slight increase in performance when doing intensive tasks.

 

As per the wattage description, the P8600 will not only produce less heat, it will also provide longer battery life. The difference in clock speed between the two CPUs will not yield any real-world performance differences.

 

i dont think there is any real world performance and games are usually bottlenecked by GPU, go for the cheapest CPU imo

 

If the heat/battery difference is negligible, why wouldn't you go with the more powerful T9400?

 

Budget reasons perhaps.

 

6MBL2


That would yield a better performance

 

not really... intels don't really deal with cache very well... minimal performance improvements going from 3 to 6mb.....

 

The larger cache will provide minimal performance gains ( < 5%) and the difference will be unnoticeable.

As far as heat is concerned, the P8400 will run much cooler when playing games than the T9400.