Which is better strictly for gaming? And are there any games that utilize Quad core technology, for that matter Dual Core. (Besides Alan Wake?)

That may have been true in 2007 but today most games do utilize a quad core cpu. Quad core all the way...

Quad core is better, of course.

I dnt know if current games fully utilize quad core technology bt in the very near future they probably wil. Plus quad core is just better bt more expensive obviously=)

Dragon Age saw a significant boost in performance with a quad core. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,698666/Dragon-Age-Origins-System-Requirements-Benchmarks-and-Graphics-Tuning-Top-article-of-November-2009/Practice/

I'd definitely recommend a quad core for gaming.

Edit: http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,698761/Dragon-Age-Origins-CPU-benchmarks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/ That's a 75% boost for quad cores.

Quad core of coarse, even if they did not use it all now, What do you want to buy a new PC next month or next year. You want a couple years out of it, buy the best you can for gaming , the stronger CPu the better, then you can upgrade the graphics card , and get another year or 2 out of your machine before buying a whole new one. PCs change over night, buy the absolute best you can NOW. Good Luck.

If you're building a computer today, unless you're on an extremely tight budget, get a quad.

You might as well get a quad, they are very cheap now. If you want to compromise, you can get a tri-core too. I would say about half of newer games benefit from 3 threads and a little less from 4.

But if you have any money in the budget you should preferentially spend it on the GPU; framerates will benefit more.

In terms of CPUs, the best value from low to high are (in my opinion) the Athlon II X2 250, Athlon II X3 435, Athlon II X4 620, Phenom II X4 925, Phenom II X4 955, Core i5 750, Core i7 860. Anything beyond that isn't good value. At sub-$200 you can see AMD is better value, there are Intel options but they are overpriced; at $200 and over there are only Intel options.

I would wait until January 7 when Intel's Clarkdale comes out; I don't expect it to change the market much because it's priced high (3.2GHz dual for the same price as AMD has a 3.2GHz quad for a lower price), but you can look at reviews (I recommend techreport.com and anandtech.com ) to see which CPUs perform well in the games you want.

I've never really bothered with Athlon, but what is Athlon's equivalence of the Intel Quad Core?