HT is not much use unless an application has been written for it; and most don't (kind of like MMX years ago when it came out). It really is a stop gap measure to get around some of the performance penalties inherent in the P4 design; I wouldn't make a buying choice based on that. I would hold out for a dual-cored chip or get more memory. From my own experience, I've just upgraded to an Athlon 64 x2 4600 (2GB ram, GF 6800 256MB), and the performance is amazing! Just to see who much I could push it, I had Poser render an animation while I ran Doom3 at full quality at the same time; it didn't drop a frame or crash at all! That's what I call multitasking!