[ghostuss]

I have it in my system right now. Really that performance boost is too little to be recognized. If you don't do hardcore graphic editing, engineering stuff. You don't need that. He will be satisfied with 2500 since he sounds like coming from a 800mhz or 1ghz computer. With some decent graphic card, and enough RAM he can tear through games such as Doom 3, HL2 without a problem.

Also another thing I would strongly suggest is to get 2 hard drives. One large, say 200GB and one small say 60-80 GB. (You can part one big hard drive into one small and one large but I would get two.) Run ur windows and all software off smaller HD. Put all ur junk, picture, video, mp3s in the 200GB hard drive. Store as little to ur smaller HD as possible. That way it guarantees you a fast machine down the road. Cause most of the time, hard drive is what's really slowing most computer down. That's why formating makes a huge difference. You can use those new, fast hard drive such as SATA, etc. But really from reading through reviews, it's like 5-10% performance upgrade. Again not worth the money. I would suggest SEAGATE hard drives. I have built many machine with the Seagate Barcuida IV (spelling?, 1:30am... tired) IV serious hard drives. - it's reliable, quiet, fast.
Anywayz if you want more advise just PM me.