Of course! :) A low L2 cache latency is always desirable but there are uses for higher L2 cache latencies as well.

A common problem among overclockers is the failure of the L2 cache to function at the higher clockspeed after the processor is overclocked. The system would simply crash while booting up as the L2 cache is unable to run at such a high speed. Before the inclusion of such a BIOS option, the only way to get the processor to run at that overclocked speed stably would be to disable the L2 cache entirely. That's counterproductive, of course, because the performance of the processor would suffer from the loss in memory bandwidth. The gain in performance from the higher clockspeed would hardly be worth the loss of the L2 cache.

But now, there may be a way to solve the problem. By increasing the L2 cache latency, it may be possible to slow down the L2 cache enough to remain stable at the overclocked speed. Thus, there's now a new overclocking tool for overclockers to play with.

Also, the higher L2 cache latencies offer us the opportunity to test out the various latencies and check to see if it's really true that a lower L2 cache latency will improve the processor's performance. After all, theory is theory and only what happens in practice is really all that matters.

In this article, we will be testing all 15 different L2 cache latencies in order to determine their effect on performance. Optimizers would be interested in just how much performance increases from the reduction of the L2 cache latency. Overclockers, on the other hand, would be interested to know the degree of performance degradation when using a higher L2 cache latency because that will help them determine if the increase in clockspeed made possible by the higher L2 cache latency is worth the loss in L2 cache performance.

But whatever the reasons are, I'm sure you will agree that it would be more than a little interesting to see how those 15 cache latencies fare against each other. So, let's move on now to the benchmarks and their results!