[G4] Quicksilver Upgrade

[John Niven]

--- nagable at comcast.net wrote:

> > b) What size L2 and L3 cache do I want?
> 
> That depends on what comes with your new processor. 
> I don't think it makes much difference.

Everything else being equal, cache size is very
important. The bigger the better. Especially when
upgrading a machine with slower memory bus to a faster
cpu. Caches act as temporary stores for the data that
the cpu is currently working on. They are much faster
than the main RAM, which is in turn much faster than
the hard drive.

So data/programs come from the hard drive to the RAM,
then to the caches (L3 first then L2). The reason for
L3 is that L2 started being built on the cpu chip
because it's faster, but you couldn't build so much of
it, so that L3 (on the cpu module) was introduced.

As an example, my AGP 350 had 1Mb L2 on the cpu
module.
I replaced the module with a 800MHz QS one, which has
256Kb L2 (on chip) and no L3. It's still faster
(because of the cpu speed) but would probably be even
faster if it had an L3 cache.

So it's really hard to say what's best but I would
always go for a bigger cache.



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