Will this processor make much of a difference?

Question

I'm getting my son a new computer. He's REALLY into gaming, and his current computer is out of date. I'm looking at the processor, and it looks like the speed is slower. I don't know much about computers, so any help would be VERY nice. So anyways, will this processor make much of a difference at ALL when it comes to his games? Here are the specs...

Current processor:
Intel Celeron D 320
90 nm
256 KB L2
2.40 GHz
533 MHz

New processor:
Intel Core2Duo E6420
4 MB L2
2.13 GHz
1066 MHz

Answer 1

The E6420 will surely provide a big performance boost. But gaming performance is a lot more dependent on the graphics card. Consider the ATI HD2600XT or Geforce 8600GT cards.

The awesome/expensive monster cards could just be bottlenecked by the E6420. They need the E6750 or E6850.

Answer 2

Yes. It will make a big difference. The Celeron is an older processor from Intel's budget line of processors. The Core2Duo is essentially 2 processors on 1 chip. In addition, it has a higher bus speed and more cache.

Answer 3

Substantially; if you enable HT technology on your Core2 machine, you will notice a substantial speed increase, as there are two physical CPU's on board (treated as a set if HTT is not enabled).
Also, specify your memory. What does the MHz value represent (what component of the machine)?

Answer 4

Yep, that will work.