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Originally Posted by sophismata
The MB does not affix directly to the case; their is a gap between the MB and the case for airflow.
Fans blow cool air onto the heatsinks, they don't blow hot air away from the heatsinks.
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While your right that the motherboard should not be attached directly to the case, that is more because the motherboard would short circuit if it were directly connected rather than heat dissipation. Also fans should be blowing AND sucking (excuse the sexual inuendo please) A properly constructed case should have fans pushing as much fresh air in as they are out.
The most common (and arguable best arrangment) for this is intake fans in the front blowing colder air in while fanse at the back/top/side sucking hot air out. Basically air should enter one side and exit out the other (usually front to back)
As for dual core not good for gaming, while its true that it wont necessarily help with games, it helps immeasurably with multitasking. I can run a virus scan, download with bittorrent, encode in h.264 all while playing FEAR without problems, something impossible on a single core setup. I cannot even begin to explain how beneficial Dual Core CPU's are, they arent just for servers/encoders they are for EVERYONE. IMO if you are spending $200+ on a new CPU you would be foolish to not pickup a dual core CPU.
Let me make on more defending statment before I move on. I have yet to be able to bring my dual core CPU to its knees ( a lowly 3800+) and I ran simultaneously:
Maya7.0 - Had an entire scene filled, 980k polygons
3DS Max - rendering short animation, 300 frames at 15 fps 640x480
Photoshop CS2 - 70MB image open saving as targa
Virus Scan - Complete Scan of hard drive
Burning a DVD - full dvd at 12x write
Azureus - 6 torrents @ over 500KB/s
UT 2004 server with 16 connections
Guild Wars - AFK @ Lions Arch
FEAR - playing the demo (no full version at the time)
I also had a bunch of other programs running but none of them especially demanding.
My CPU wasnt at its limit yet, what WAS at its limit was my Hard Drive and Memory, especially hard drive. I definitely reached its max I/O's and it was struggling. I was also using about 3.8 GB's of memory and almost 3GB of Page File.
If I were running a setup with hard drives that could do more I/O operations I am sure that that my gaming experience would have been more pleasant. In short more than 2 CPU's = t3h win