Does PCSX2 benefit at all from L3 caching?

[ph34rme]

A Phenom is better than an Athlon. And you'll want every bit of help you can get with PCSX2, especially if you're going with an AMD.

Looks like the cheapest Athlon II X4 is $100 (on Newegg).
Why not just grab the Phenom II X4 955 BE? Only $5 more with the promo right now.

Holy cow, that's awesome, thanks for the heads up.


Newegg is always having deals like this, so I'll be keeping an eye out in the upcoming weeks. I recently got a very nice laptop HDD replacement/upgrade for only $40 via one of their daily "shell shocker" deals.

[naoan]

well, for budget minded build, AMD is indeed the better choice for price/core, and a plus for future compatibility (albeit sort lived since piledriver most likely won't be compatible with AM3+).

I have Phenom II but I don't know how it is compared to Athlon II, most games are actually playable with speedhack.

[ph34rme]

well, for budget minded build, AMD is indeed the better choice for price/core, and a plus for future compatibility (albeit sort lived since piledriver most likely won't be compatible with AM3+).

I have Phenom II but I don't know how it is compared to Athlon II, most games are actually playable with speedhack.

Heck, I'm currently playing on an Athlon II X3 and it runs fine aside from the few quirks mentioned.

That said, I'm wondering if it might be equivalent to get the AMD Phenom II X4 945 Deneb 3.0GHz and just upclock it to 3.2 Ghz. Primarily I'm considering that because the 945 is only 95w as opposed to 125w. The mobo I've got in mind only supports up to 125, whereas getting the 945 over the 955 would give me wiggle room there.

If this is dumb, please inform me, I'm familiar with overclocking via multiplier, but not up-volting (I just stopped when things got unstable when OC'ing in the past).

Also, why is it that the 945's wattage is so much lower despite a mere 0.2Ghz increase? Is anyone familiar with this, I feel like there's something I'm missing, as they're both Denebs, not different models.

[Koji]

It's probably much more likely a matter of "safety" in it's recommendations. AMD doesn't brand CPUs as 105w, they brand them as 95 or 125. The latter probably exceeds the 95w TDP by a little and thus is bumped up to being a 125w in branding just to keep things simplified. That said, if the 3.2ghz is running at a significantly higher voltage for whatever reason, you can always undervolt the CPU to bring it's TDP down... Though much like overclocking you do have to be wary of stability issues. Unlike overvolting though, there is significantly less chance of damaging your hardware.