I know a lot of people have been asking the same question, Dual or Quad core?
 
Well here's my setup:
600 PS
Cpu (?)
Asus M2N SLi nForce 560
2 gigs of RAM
8800GT
500 gig hard drive
Windows XP (When Vista is refined, I'm going to do a dual boot)
 
These are the perspective cpus:
 
AMD Athlon 6400+ Dual (3.2 ghz)
AMD Phenom 9500+ Quad (2.2 ghz)
 
Since most programs don't utilize quad or dual fully, which one seems more future proof and also good for the moment? If I get the quad, will my system only use 1 or 2 of the cores and would I then have a dual-core 2.2 ghz cpu since all cores aren't utilized? Will a quad core be faster than a dual core on games, photoshop, etc now? or will the dual core be faster?
 
I'm going to use my comp for games (Oblivion, Mass Effect, maybe Crysis), photoshop, and basic multitasking. Which cpu do you think will do better considering my setup and uses?
 
Thanks a lot

For gaming go with the dual core. You can still mutlitask with a dual core just fine.
 
Also stay away from 9500, and go with 9X50 instead, if you choose quad.

As flyin said, avoid the phenoms without a 50 on the end. For your purpose, dual would be better though, especially with that clock difference. A Phenom 9850 wouldn't be bad, and would probably be a bit faster in the few games coded for more than 2 cores (Crysis, Supreme Commander, FSX), but I'd still probably go for the Athlon.