Xeon: Dual vs. Quad

[mattb]

Hi. My employer has budgeted to get me a new PC. We are standardized on Dell, so I don't have a lot of leeway there, but I get to come up with the spec's as long as it fits the budget.

I'm a software developer, doing a lot of .Net and SQL Server work. I also do web development. We are mostly a Microsoft shop using VS 2003/2005, SQL2005, etc.

I'm looking at Dell's Precision 490, which has a bunch of CPU choices.
I considered quad core, but it seemed like I could get more bang for the buck with a faster dual due to limited software that supports quad.

So initially I had chosen this:
Dual Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5150 2.66GHz, 4MB L2,1333MHz

But the rep came back to our HW guy and said that for our discount, he could upgrade the CPU to this one for the same price:
Quad Core Xeon Proc E5335 2.00GHz, 2 X4MB L2 Cache 1333MHz

So I'm torn. I lose some clock speed but gain two cores and double the L2 cache. But can I make use of those two extra cores? I could probably ask about a faster dual instead, but thought I'd get the opinions here.

What do you folks think?

 

[Newtek]

go with the Quads. they perform faster than the dual cores on almost every benchmark and application, even though they are at lower clock speeds.