I built my computer a little over a year ago and I put this processor in it and believe me you will never look back to what you've upgraded from. This processor runs at a clock of 3.4GHz with 2MB L2 and 6MB L3 cache and this black edition comes with the multipliers unlocked making overclocking easy for even the novice. This gives plenty of grunt to runs lots of programs concurrently or large, CPU draining applications. More importantly though, it has a high clock speed meaning games and process which are resticted to a single-core still run faster than on most other processors.

The only fault with this processor is that standard heatsink and fan, which is very poor and I would recommend that when upgrading to this processor that you invest in a better heatsink and fan because the standard is very loud and over 6-12 months the supplied thermal paste will degrade meaning the fan will have to run faster making it even louder as time goes on. It's not enough however to reduce the rating of this processor as it is one of the best value for money quad-cores and offers mid to high range performance without some of the huge price tags attached to the intel equivalents.