antmiu2 :
i wont be gettin afermarket cooler till may so i dont oc.. what the multi-threading stuff? i just mostly do basic stuff on the comp. and now and then play a heavy game so...?
Multi-threading just means that the program (game or app) has been programmed to have multiple channels of calculations going at once. A game can have a tremendous amount of calculations that are not very dependent upon each other, and often run concurrently.
For example... Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. A relatively obscure title, but it's an MMORPG offered by Sony. If I remember correctly, they modified the UT3 game engine to offer much better graphics and sound quality. What they found was their new engine bogged down the CPU way too much. So they decided to give an option to offload all the audio for the game to a separate thread, and frame rates increased by quite a bit.
How did it do this? Well, windows can put different threads into different CPU cores. So, while one core is working on feeding the video card pretty graphics to render, the other can work on the audio. This allows both tasks to run faster.
These days, programmers are really starting to get busy about multi-threading games and other applications, to make use of all the extra power those extra cores in the CPU have. Some games currently use more than 4 cores.... Microsoft's FSX is extremely multi-threaded and CPU dependant. Grand Theft Auto IV, while it needs serious optimization, is heavily multi-threaded as well.
So, getting a quad core CPU right now will help you more down the road than a dual core. Plenty of titles out there with 3+ threads right now as it is.