This question has come up as many times as any of us can count, and it always seems to devolve into which one you like better as to what will get suggested.
I've been asked by three seperate people in PM that I post my answer from another thread (that will eventually get burried, just like all the rest) so that everyone can see it and perhaps it can be stickied somewhere. I'm not a mod, so I can't guarantee anything
Here goes:
Quote:
The answer goes like this:
Dual core for gaming and pretty much any "normal" amount of multitasking anyone will do like IM + WMP + game + Skype + AV + other misc stuff like that.
Quad core for video/audio compressing, professional Adobe apps, knocking down world record synthetic benchmarks like 3DMark06 / Vantage, Folding / Seti'ing / any other distributed computing application, and ridiculously multitasking things like playing two games at once 
Duals overclock better, cost less, apply less stress to the motherboard, use less power and put out less heat than a quad. Which means, unless you NEED the quad, then it makes far more sense to buy the dual.
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That quote is reasonably accurate for the timeframe between the day this is posted to probably mid-2009. There
are games that take advantage of quad cores, but they are in very small supply and may not be CPU bottlenecked enough to see a difference anyway.
And a few people will make sure to come in and add that your GPU is a more likely bottleneck than the CPU, which is yet again only a stronger argument for purchasing a cheaper, cooler, quieter dual core versus a quad.