One question on the minds of gamers looking to upgrade is whether going the dual core route will bring faster and smoother gameplay. PC Magazine answers one reader email pertaining to this subject:

The answer is, it depends. Some of today's games are already multithreaded. Your example of call of duty 2 is one such game. If you download the 1.01 (or later) patch and install it, Call of Duty 2 moves a lot of the work of communicating with the graphics driver to a second core. This may not sound like much but can result in a significant increase in frame rate. Many of the games that are shipping this holiday season are multithreaded and will take advantage of dual-core CPUs.