I don't know how it will work for gaming, but I just got a new Core2 Duo laptop and LOVE it. It's much faster than my older desktop PC that has a faster single core CPU. I would think about what's going to come down the road in the next couple of years. Games will be designed to take advantage of the multi-core chips. So, I would go with the short term slowdown in favor of long term advantages.

>I have obtained some price quotes for a new computer, and the big rage seems to be the Intel Core 2 Duo. Specifically, I have two offers from the same company, one without this Core 2 Duo ("Pentium 4, 3.2 GHz"), and one with ("Intel Core 2 Duo, 1.8 GHz"), with similar prices. Actually, the slower (in clock speed) Core 2 Duo is slightly more expensive.
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>Would the much slower clock speed be sufficiently compensated by the fact that - as I understand it - there seem to be two processors on one package? Is it really two processors? How well do the two processors work together? In summary, from which of the two - faster, single core, or slower, double-core - can I expect to get a better performance?
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>Of course, I could also go for a higher clock speed, but it seems those are quite a bit of price difference for those, so I was thinking of the slower (and cheaper) models.
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>TIA,
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>Hilmar.