Phenom 9600... good budget chip?

I'd say go for a faster/cheaper x2. He won't notice the difference plus they use less power. He could always upgrade in a year or so when AMD comes out with a decent quad. My x2 5400 is only 2.8ghz but it is more than enough for me.

It's not the bug that limits performance, but rather the BIOS setting that "fixes" the bug. If you disable the fix in BIOS then there is no performance hit. I do recall that there was an issue where Vista was enabling the fix regardless of what the BIOS setting was and I'm not sure if that was ever resolved however.

@ xstang: For $100 it's a fantastic deal if you need a quad core but not necessarily a fast quad core. Where the quad core processor will really help you versus a dual core is if you are going to be multitasking. I'd gauge how often your father will be running multiple applications at the same time and use this as the determining factor for whether a quad core is warranted. If not then I'd follow Outlander's advice and look into an 8X50 triple-core our 7X50 dual core. I would note however that the BIOS support for these processors is not as widespread as it should be so make sure to check that your motherboards supports them.

The Phenom 9600 has a 95-watt TDP, which puts it around as warm as the coolest Prescotts, which were rated at 86 watts (others were 110 W.) However, the Phenom 9600 will run cooler than a Prescott despite throwing off about as much heat because AMD's heatsink is a bunch better than Intel's Prescott heatsinks.