I concur with this guy quite much to a T. I would increase it by saying it wasn't even a decade before that this occurred though. I'd say it occurred on a minor scale with the Athlon and then enormous with the core2's. What I signify by that is, you used to be equal to swamp down a computer, "have too many windows open", not can minimize a game lacking it locking up your whole system for 3 minutes. Well, at this time we are past that and have been for two or 3 years. I confront you to hold up any quad core with a pile of random programs. It's damned near unfeasible.

And, to the comment of the OP some posts back, if the original thread was in views to "gaming fan".....when was the last time the CPU was the choosing factor? As long as I can remember, the GPUs have ALWAYS been the block. I'd say the gpu's have idles way more than the processors. The 8800Gtx I used was on top of the market for a year. How does that occur? Also, a few years down the road, this thing is still holding its own. You can't actually say that about a P4.