Some of us may be lucky enough to have lots of cash lying around the house -- but for most people, when you go to build that gaming rig you've always wanted, your probably going to be working within a limited budget.

Whether your budget is $500, $1000, or $1500 dollars, your still going to have choices: you can't have the best of every component, so your going to have to splurge on some items, and go cheap on others, in order to stay within that budget, and get the best gaming machine for your buck.

Without a doubt, if you are building a games machine, your biggest consideration is with what GPU to go with -- nothing will effect your framerates more than your GPU.

But when it comes down to your CPU choice, how much money can you save in this category? What's a reasonable amount of processing power to feed that shiny new graphics card you decided upon? The aim of this article is to help you out with this question. Specifically: what difference does a gigahertz make? In order to get a better handle on what kind of performance difference a processor can make, we decided to take a Core 2 Duo and clock it at different speeds starting from 1.6 GHz, all the way to 3.0 GHz, to see what kind of affect this would have on frame rates in four recent games: Crysis, World In Conflict, Call of Jaurez, and Unreal Tournament 3.

The results might be surprising.

Let's talk about our hardware, and testing methodology, and then get into some benchmarks.