Well if you wanna think like i did when i decided to stick with single core for now you can. Heres wut i thought.... How many applications are multithreaded and fully use a Dual-core...... slim to none.... and how long will it be till there are goin to be some.... who knows.... the average PC user has a single core and iwll have a single core for at least another year or so and that'll delay mutl-threaded programs a little bit.... so get a good single core now (Opty 144) and then get a good video card (X1800XT or X1900XT(X)). You can always upgrade to a dual-core in a couple of days... months... years... decades (pff yea right more like years).... just give that a thought.... For every 2 years hardware technology increases..... software technology is 2 years behind it (kramers rule or something like that but i has never been disproven)
dual-cores are good for multitaskin but good single cores can mutlitask too... i was runnin virus scan, adaware SE scan, disk clean-up, listenin to music, on aim and msn, and browsin the web with my Pentium 4 with no lag...