Encoding with a quad core.?

Well, as far as games go, any older games you play might actually slow down because of a clock rate loss. But ya, provided you can get the right software, you'll see a good performance improvement. By the right software I mean newer encoders that have multithreaded support. Plus you can do more things in parallel. With the quad core the best bus speed you can get is 1333Mhz, but unless you're about to do anything highly memory intensive, you don't really need the speed. For this kind of a system I'd recommend getting a decent graphics card, as companies like Nvidia release better decoders and encoders optmized for GPUs. Basically, unless you're a compute intensive user, there's little point in making the expenditure, as most software now is barely optimized for dual core, forget quads. It's a mad scramble right now to convert software to such a model, so it's worth the wait while the manufacturers get their act together before taking the plunge.