yeah - availability and price will not be a problem when i come back from my summer hols which is when i intend to buy. Plus i can get trade prices
TBH, from all the benchmarks the dual cores can easily compete with their current single cored brethren in all disciplines. So if I can overclock on air the dual cores to 2.7Ghz i think that will still be a cracking CPU - and i doubt it will be all that expensive either if I get the 2.2Ghz models for £250 to £300.
Anyway, i do do a lot of media transcoding in the background, PVR, and folding and gaming on my athlon at the moment so i think dual core is precisely what i need as long as it can hold its own against current cpus. can you imagine - dual cores in a SFF - or better yet, dual 275s in an iwill zmax dp
But then again, your reply was hardly relevant in terms of answering my questions