You've stumbled onto the dirty little secret of hyperthreading; looked at one way, it just allows exectution of another program thread, which sounds really cool. Looked at another way, it mimics -some- aspects of a dual core system...but only some. The software that HT speeds up has been specifically optimized to utilize it; with the other 99% of the code out there, it is very much a hit and miss affair. And with apps like Vue, that is MP aware (but not optimized to know what hyperthreading is), you get into a situation where part of the code is saying 'Multiple Processors Found', and the rest of the code saying 'NOT!'. The time you lose is the app making calls, getting no response, defaulting back to single processor single thread execute mode, then hitting another call that trips the same event loop again. And again. etc... HT is a nice little hardware trick...but its usefulness is strictly limited by having a OS that knows how to interface with it, and a app that knows what the hell it is in the first place. Outside of that, it tends to be more a drag on systems than a help. How's that Prescott behave thermally?