*cost-effective* CPU - photo editing & sound recording ??

Greetings -

I have an Athlon 2700 XP w/ 2GB of DDR333 RAM on an old Gigabyte 7n-400S board. (So we're talkin' late '02 CPU on a late '04 board).

Question 1
Will pretty much any inexpensive modern CPU w/ 2GB of RAM pretty much smoke my existing setup? And if so, any thoughts as to how much faster?
(e.g. - AMD Athlon 64 X2 5400 Brisbane 2.8, Athlon 64 X2 5050e Brisbane 2.6,
Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5).

I'm particularly interested in the 5050e -- I rather like the idea of 45w.
That said, since the processors are relatively new, I've not been able to locate any comparison benchmarks.

Question 2
Can anyone advise how these CPUs would fare in comparison to one another (a ranking or, better still, percentage-wise (even roughly)?

The most intensive use I make of the PC is photo editing (~10-15MB RAW files)
and recording songs.

Thanks much.

- Richard
oldWithoutMoney.com