well, as the title of the article says, this is a gaming box. Quad isn't used in gaming, so you can get a duo with a higher clock speed at that price. [snip] For games, you need 2 cores and major clock speed, not a quad core and mediocre clock speed.
Sorry, but that's completely false. Sure, you can hit 4GHz relatively easily with a Core 2 Duo E8xxx, but good Quads are regularly hitting 3.6GHz. I fail to see how the former is major speed and the latter is mediocre, especially since you will see completely negligible real-world benefit.
The duals beat quads almost exclusively in synthetic benchmarks that do not reflect real world gains. Most games available today are GPU-bound (with several notable exceptions like GTA4 and WoW), so squeezing out an extra 400MHz on the dual core will not necessarily net you even a modest framerate increase.
If anything, a C2Q will seem more responsive in everyday use because the extra cores can be used for common multitasking -- alt-tab out of a game, turn on some music, start burning a DVD, etc. A dual core will be pegged by a couple processor-intensive tasks, while a quad has room to breathe.
So yeah, I fail to see why a dual core is a shoe-in for a gaming machine while a quad is not, unless the buyer in question doesn't care at all about future releases, multitasking, or present-day multithreaded applications.
