I've recently upgraded from a Pentium D 830 to this monster, without really upgrading anything else in the computer, and the difference it made was exceptional.
This is the 2nd generation (already) Intel processor based on it's 'core' microarchitecture. The previous being called Netburst, and is still around in Pentium 4's and Pentium D 9 series processors.
The beauty of the Core 2 Duo chips are the incredible power they are capable of, which producing half the heat of the Pentium 4's.
On benchmarking, this processor alone increased the speed of my computer by 53%. This is a huge amount considering i payed less than £300! It's like having a whole new processor.
The processor has a very fast Front Side Bus (FSB) speed of 1066 Mhz and will work with the fastest Ram you can throw at it.
It also stays very cool, even under excrutiatingly hardcore tasks, like encoding 3 DVD's simultaneously while editing my photos in the number crunching monster that is Adobe Photoshop CS2.
The brilliance behind it is due to several important things. There is a 4Mb cache (which is a lot more than AMD give you) which is shared between the cores depending on what they are each doing, providing maximum efficiency.
It also sports wide execution, meaning it can perform up to 4 tasks in a single clock cycle, unthinkable only a couple of years ago.
Other power saving features allow one of the cores, or even just part of a core to power down when not being used, thus saving energy, hence why new laptops are as powerful as their desktop equivalents. The chip can also read further ahead than ever down the list of executions it has to perform and can thus get all the data ready before it's needed to maximise the efficiency of processing.
The core 2 duo processor is avaiable in several variants, from the e6300 up to the extreme series ex6800, which is the same as the chip i've got, but clock unlocked, so the processor speed is even faster.
There really is no set of chips on the market to rival these, if you're after a cheap upgrade, the e6300 or e6400 are a bargain, for serious power i highly recommend the e6700, which is just amazing.
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