But I was wondering if I put that processor in my sons computer how much of a difference he would notice in performance. He mostly games on his computer, but he doesnt play anything thats real graphics intensive. Mostly MMOs and such.
If its games similar to Facebook flash games etc, the difference would not be noticeable unless you ran a benchmark to look at the raw processing power numbers.
A list of what games he plays would help better. All the games that I can think of that are not graphically intense and can otherwise run fine on integrated video would be a breeze for the 4-core. Games that come to mind that fall into this category would probably have system requirements that state Pentium 4 1.5Ghz or better and 64MB Video Card.
The FX-4300 isnt a bad or weak CPU. Its more then plenty for what his needs are if light-weight games are thrown at it. The 4300 would even do well with many graphically intensive games with a decent video card added.
If he wanted to run a new graphically intensive game, then you would want to have the better 6-core. However if he is planning on only running light-weight games, its a waste to spend money to replace the CPU when the cores are pretty much at rest running the light-weight games.
A good check would be to have him run his games and look in task manager and look to see how the core activity displays. If the cores are all running above 75% then he might want the 6-core, but as I experienced with some flash games if the games are flash based, flash is single threaded and so you will see a single core pegged to 90-100% and the other cores at rest if nothing else is running to multitask to see the pure behavior of the game itself. The difference between the 4 and 6 core processor I dont feel would be at all noticeable with a flash based game which doesnt utilize the full potential of the CPU due to this fact.
