[Atamido]

I'm trying to decide between the Intel E3300 and E5400. The only difference between the two is the E5400 has an extra 200MHz and a 2MB L2 cache instead of the 1MB on the E3300.

Would the extra 1MB of L2 cache make a difference for XBMC?

[sraue]

I'm trying to decide between the Intel E3300 and E5400. The only difference between the two is the E5400 has an extra 200MHz and a 2MB L2 cache instead of the 1MB on the E3300.

Would the extra 1MB of L2 cache make a difference for XBMC?

the second difference is that the E3300 is an Celeron, then E5400 is an Pentium CPU. if you want safe money you can take an slower CPU, but i would use an Pentium CPU with at least 2 Cores.

[ion_man]

the second difference is that the E3300 is an Celeron, then E5400 is an Pentium CPU. if you want safe money you can take an slower CPU, but i would use an Pentium CPU with at least 2 Cores.

Celeron and Pentium are just marketing names these days, those two cpus are both dual-core and using the same core architecture (wolfdale), the difference is just MHz and L2 cache as Atamido says.

With regards to which one is better for XBMC, it depends what graphics card you will be using, if you have a Nvidia, then go with the Celeron, if you use the on-board Intel GPU, then the extra power of the Pentium could be useful.

[poofyhairguy]

The extra cache doesn't matter- for CPU decoding it is all about clock speed.

I have a Celeron 420 with I think less than a meg of cache, and as long as it is overclocked fast enough, it will play 1080p.

The limit seems to be around 2.4GHZ for a low end Core2Duo- any thing less with struggle.