I completely disagree, as a media user having two monitors to have many things open at once is efficient, and besides, I'm a gamer too, remember?
Anyways, the case I've been contemplating for a long time, you see I liked it for aesthetic reasons, buy yeah it has lots of issues concerning efficiency. Buuut im about ready to cave for any day now.
It looks like a transformer!
You guys are gonna have to elaborate on why I should get the i7, I did a good amount of research and many different forums recommended the P45, they said If I was going to use cross fire with two gpu's, then I should get the i7, otherwise no. I've also read a lot of problems people have had with the i7.
Dont be afraid to go in depth, I taught myself about all the computers components.
Problems with i7...like what??? The price. There are no specific problems with i7 chips that i know of.
Now, if you are using 3ds Max, there is a very strong reason for going i7. It is the main 3d program i use and i7 benifits alot from both the faster chip and because it uses HyperThreading (look it up if you dont know what i mean). The reason this is good for 3ds Max all comes down to rendering. An i7 will render 30-40% faster than a comparable Core 2 Quad. Now if your anything like me, that will mean ALOT of time saving.
Now if you dont plan to go with i7, thats fine, but i would at least go for a quad core. A quad core will see basically double the performance in rendering compared to a dual core. If you use the Mental Ray renderer you will notice that a dual core will use 2 rendering buckets, a quad core would use 4, and an i7 would use 8 rendering buckets (4 cores with HT = 8).
So to break it down, in rendering performance:
Core 2 Quad would be ~ 90% faster than a dual core,
i7 would be ~ 30-40% faster than Core 2 Quad and,
i7 would be ~ 150% faster than a dual core.
As for the dual monitor setup, i can totally understand your position. I have used two monitors for the last 4 years and there is no going back for me. They only give my 1 monitor at work and its annoys the crap out of me not having an extra one for graphical work.
So the sweet spot for you might be to go for a Q9550 or something. If you dont do much rendering, then i guess its not necessary then.