NEED? hmm more the better if your a multi-tasker like myself...saves a lot of hassle when running dedicated game servers when you can assign seperate cores that dont overlap into the main game itself. My typical setup would be 2-3 cores for game client and 1 for dedicated server. any spare core would be set for background tasks...lol
YES I am the kinda guy that will encode video files in backdrop while gaming.... try that on single core or even dual core and it soon becomes obvious it's rubbish without at least 3 cores, my proof? I built this 3 old rig initially with a e6600 heart and a year later upped it to the q6600 and the difference was substancial....sure anything over dual core sucks on XP, but we ain't here to discuss that old crappy OS....get with the time and go 64bit and pump up the cores...hehe