Rate your CPU speed at games
To see how fast your CPU is at games, you've got to get some info on your CPU. The CPU is the chip in your computer which does most of the processing. Common CPU names are Pentium III, Pentium IV, Core 2 Duo, Celeron, Athlon, Athlon 64, Duron, and Sempron. You need to know approximately how fast it is. You should figure out if you have a low-end, midrange, or high-end CPU. To do that you need the clock rate of your CPU. This is measured in MHz (megahertz - millions of cycles per second) or GHz (gigahertz - billions of cycles per second). You can get this information from CPU-Z. CPU-Z comes as a zip file so you'll need to unzip it to use it. Select the "CPU" tab to access your CPU information. The name of your CPU is in the "Name" field in the "Processor" section. The clock rate of your CPU is in the "Core Speed" field in the "Clocks" section. You may also need the size of your L2 cache which is in the "Level 2" field in the "Cache" section. In the example below, the CPU is a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with a 512K L2 cache.
Now find your CPU in the table below. It gives a rough approximation of the speed of your CPU for late 2006 games. Keep in mind that different games load your CPU by different amounts. Some games are more dependent on the speed of your video card and other games are more dependent on the speed of your CPU. The dual core CPUs like the Core 2 Duo, the Athlon 64 X2, and the Pentium D have two complete CPU cores crammed into one package but that doesn't mean that they're twice as fast. Some games benefit from having two CPUs but most current games don't. And if there is a benefit, it usually isn't very much. As time passes, games will take better advantage of multiple CPU cores so their gaming performance relative to single core CPUs will improve over time. The table below just gives a general approximation for an average game. The values were derived by crunching together results from a number of different game benchmarks on various web sites. Keep in mind that it's just a general approximation. CPU performance can vary quite a bit from game to game.
If you'd like to know more about your CPU then this is a good article to read. You can compare CPU performance on various kinds of programs on this page.
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