i'll put it this way. single cores are out. by this time next year quad cores will be where dualies are now. there are already "budget" quads in the works. i think some cheaper ones are already on shelves. (yes, intel is calling the Q6600 a budget chip at the low low price of $835)
in about a year or so, most new games will be multithreaded and will take advantage of more than one core. there are a few out right now, i think CoD2 and Q4 are multithreaded. i know that UT2k7 (UT3) will support at least 2 cores, possibly up to 8 (i think).
even if you are just running single threaded apps only, you will still have an advantage with a dual core cpu. instead of everything hogging the same core while you're playing a game, you can have the game running on one core, and everything else on the other one. i did that for a while with UT2k4. i ran a server on one core, and played the game on the other. ping is always 0.
give me a price range and i'll throw something together for you.
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