well, i barely ever do encoding but i'm still planning on buying a X2 because, as i said earlier, would like to run some programs in the background that are very resource-heavy (firewalls, virus scans, downloads....) Resource-heavy programs also benefit X2 since one core would handle the game, the other core would handle all of the other programs running in the background of windows. GO to your task manager and see how many programs your already running. With X2, those programs would be running on the "second" core while you game on the "first" core. You won't notice any performace drop with X2.
X2's are actually not really expensive since it's two cores. It's almost the same price if you compare two 3200+ and one X2 3800+.
X2's are actually not really expensive since it's two cores. It's almost the same price if you compare two 3200+ and one X2 3800+.