I currently have a pentium 4 1.7ghz processor running on my machine. It works pretty well with the games and work that i do. Im looking in to getting a celeron D 2.96GHZ processor and i was just wondering if that will slow down my game playing and work to below that of the P4. Thanks for any help.

I think it's 2.93GHz, not 2.96?

You're "upgrading" from a P4 to a Celeron? It would help if you gave us the make/model of your board. That CPU runs at 133MHz (533FSB) so your board would have to support it.

ASUS A7N8X-X
Athlon XP 1800+
8.5 x 200MHz
1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7
Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

I think Celeron D 2.93ghz is far more better than P4 1.7ghz when it comes to DVDshrink, CD Ripping, Encoding etc..but in games, u will experience a slight delay in loading BIG games but in performance, i GO for CELERON D.

AsRock P4I45Gv Intel Chipsets
Celeron D 2.40 Ghz
DDR333 512mb ram
40GB HDD Western Digital Geforce FX 256MB/128bit

The Celeron D is based on the prescott core, so you are jumping to a newer core for one, but if you look at the specs all you are really doing is jumping to a overclocked old northwood pentium 4 as funny as that may sound. You should just get a faster ad updated northwood pentium 4 even if you can only go up to say 2.4ghz that 2.4ghz will still out preform that Celeron D in a lot of apps.