My System vs Itself (CPU Switching) : LGA775 Pentium 4 (631)HT Emt64 Capable 3.0 Ghz 800mhz FSB 2MB L2 Cache VS. LGA775 Celeron D (352)Emt 64 Capable 3.2 Ghz 533mhz FSB 512MB L2 Cache 1GB Ram 128MB Video Card OS: Windows Vista Ultimate I'm concerned that I don't understand the relativity of the L2 Cache and how it may or may not increase my system's over-all performance. I switch between the cpu's at times but rarely see an increase or decrease in over-all criteria. Which would someone be able to say is superior than the other pound for pound and why? Any response would be gladly appreciated.

A larger L2 cache will be able to hold more instructions for the CPU and thus provide a greater percentage of cache hits. In the end the larger the L2 cache the more instructions the cpu can hold. You won't notice a diff between 512kb of L2 cache or 2mb of L2 cache unless you are putting your cpu to work. The Pentuim 4 631 is superior to the Celeron D 352 in terms of overall preformance, due to the fact that it has not only a much larger L2 cache, but it also has a faster Front Side Bus aswell. Then again, you won't notice the preformance advantages with the Pentuim 4 631 over the Celeron D 352, if you aren't using your pc for gaming, photo editing, video editing or anything else that requires the cpu to work. So, It all depends upon what you do with your pc in the end. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz 4GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Actually if both the P4 and the Celeron D has the same FSB and clock speed, the P4 will outperform it by a margin since the new Celeron D(Cedar Mill core) has 8-way associative L2 cache(same as P4 631) compared to the Prescott Celeron with 4-way and Northwood Celeron with 2-way. If you even plan to overclock, the Celeron D 352 can be overclock to 4.8ghz easily on air and the Celeron D 356 can be overclock to 5.0ghz easily stock air cooling. TMP-Man Asus P5P800 PAT P4 506 @ 4009Mhz 1.3v Thermaltake CLP0024 w/ 1700RPM 92MM + AS5 2GB OCZ 2-3-2-5 DDR400 120GB/300GB 7200RPM HD Leadtek 7600 AGP 590/1600 VF700 ALCU AS5

If "Its" and "Buts" were candy and nuts, then we would all have a merry xmass. :) AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz 4GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

if u really want to know the difference btn your CPUs, try converting a video, audio or compressing a file and see which one takes less/more time than the other and make sure u have a stopwach when doing the test. j.b.