Hi everyone. I have to decide which processor to get for the new rig im building.

I was looking at the AMD Athlon 64 3800+ for $282

but as i scrolled down i noticed that the AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ is only $13 more.

Now im confused.

A little info for you:

I want this rig mainly for gaming, MMORPGs and other games like F.E.A.R., etc...

I have seen benchmarks where the dual cores beat out the single cores. But i heard someone mention that dual cores dont currently help with gaming performance, and in fact hinder it.

So i turn to you.

Help inform me please.

For only $13 more, I'd go with the dual core. It's like having two of the single cores running at the same time. I don't know why they would hinder game performence, though I don't own a dual core, so I can't say from experience. The part about not helping performence could be in refrence to graphics, which would make it true, as the graphics card handles that separately form the processor.

Dual core enables more processes to run well at a time. Windows recognizes them as dual processors.

Whether you need that for gaming is questionable, but if you run a lot of open aps/windows you definitely do.

The normal 3800+ runs at 2.4 GHz with 512 KB L2 cache. Since games only use one of the cores the X2 3800+ will look, to the game, like an old 3200+, with 2.0 GHz and 512 KB L2 cache. If your going to do something processor heavy in the background, then you would win on having a dual-core, otherwise you would loose quite some perfromance. For you to go over to dual-core without loosing performance, you would have to jump all the way up to a X2 4600+ @ $550.

Dual core is an investment for the future. Not all applications make use of the dual core technology - but as it becomes more common this will start to happen.