Systems, methods, and apparatuses for implementing selective victimization to reduce power and utilized bandwidth in a multi-level cache hierarchy. Each set of an upper-level cache includes a counter that keeps track of the number of times the set was accessed. These counters are periodically decremented by another counter that tracks the total number of accesses to the cache. If a given set counter is below a certain threshold value, clean victims are dropped from this given set instead of being sent to a lower-level cache. Also, a separate counter is used to track the total number of outstanding requests for the cache as a proxy for bus-bandwidth in order to gauge the total amount of traffic in the system. The cache will implement selective victimization whenever there is a large amount of traffic in the system.