How important is cache size?

[DGaley27]

will i drastically hurt my performance on games/multimedia if i go from a 2mb L2 cache to a 1mb?

[K. Eng]

What do you define as a "drastic" hit in performance?

Short answer: Probably Not.

I tend to define it as the point at which a user notices the degradation in performance (the generally accepted figure is 10%+ hit, unless the game runs so fast that a 10% hit would be unoticeable, i.e. 540 FPS against 600 FPS; a user is unlikely to see the difference).

Performance gain from doubling cache size is about 5-6% from 1M to 2M.

If you are rendering something and it takes a couple hours, 5-6% might be significant though.

As with many things, "it depends".

[plucky duck]

What I use the laptop for is to convert DVD to SVCD using DVD2SVCD, would you think that it'll make a noticeable difference in this area?

Normal time from start (ripping) to end is ~6hrs. Planning on switching from 1.6Ghz Banias to 1.7Ghz/1.8Ghz/2Ghz Dothan.