I own exactly the configuration you mentioned in your first post. My old PC was a Pentium 4 2,53 GHz with only 512 MB RAM. So for me the speed of my new compuer is a HUGE difference compared to my old one - however, when talking about Vue I don't know if it's just my PC that's performing better or if it's also the rewritten rendering engine of Vue 6.

In any case I absolutely recommend the new Intel Core 2 Duo. And yes, Vue recognizes both CPUs.