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Have you been lusting after a dual-core processor but are unwilling to pay the premium price? Your wait may be over. New dual-core CPUs from AMD and Intel are showing up in desktop systems priced around $1500, within the budget of mainstream computer users. Our first tests of such systems indicate that dual-core chips provide good value.

If you wanted to own one of the first dual-core systems to hit the market, you had to pay the typical cutting-edge premium: Intel's first dual-core chip, the 3.2-GHz Pentium Extreme Edition 840, initially sold for $1100. Now the company's cheapest dual-core processor, the 2.8-GHz Pentium D 820, is about $250 online.

When AMD launched its dual-core chips in August, it also targeted the high end, with its 2.4-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor. That chip still sells for almost $900. Now AMD is offering several more-affordable dual-core chips, including the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which currently goes for as little as $359 online.

To rate the performance of affordable dual-core CPUs, we ordered two nearly identical computers from HP and ran them both through PC World's WorldBench 5 applications benchmark, as well as through our desktop graphics tests.

On our WorldBench 5 test, the AMD-based Pavilion outperformed the Intel-equipped system by 10 percent, with a score of 100 to the other's 91.

The results were similar on our graphics test, which tracks frame rates while running the games Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Unreal Tournament at several resolutions. The AMD-equipped Pavilion bested the Intel-based system 201 frames per second to 183 fps, a 10 percent difference.

The two computers were built around the same basic components, including 1GB of RAM, a 400GB hard disk, and an nVidia GeForce 6800 graphics card. The only differences involved the processor, the motherboard, and the RAM type. The AMD-based system we used, a Pavilion d4100e, incorporated a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 X2 4200+ CPU and DDR-400 RAM; the Intel-based Pavilion d4100y was assembled around a 3.2-GHz Pentium D 840 processor and 533-MHz DDR2 memory.

The dual-core systems were fast for mainstream PCs, their scores running even with or slightly better than the marks of the fastest single-core systems we have tested for our value-PC rankings. For example, a Micro Express MicroFlex 35B system built around a 2.2-GHz Athlon 64 3500+ turned in a score of 101 on WorldBench 5, nearly identical to the mark of 100 that the dual-core Athlon box from HP posted. And HP's a1050y system scored 89 with its 3.4-GHz Pentium 4 530 processor, nearly matching the Intel-based dual-core system.

The fastest dual-core system we've tested is Xi Computer's $3897 MTower 64 AGE-SLI, which relied on an Athlon 64 X2 4800+ chip to speed to a WorldBench 5 score of 130. By comparison, the best mark for an Intel-based dual-core system is 98, from a PC with the superexpensive Pentium Extreme Edition CPU.

While the dual-core systems excelled at multitasking in WorldBench 5, many of the other apps we use for testing don't take advantage of multiple CPU cores. Individual software programs that support multithreading, such as Adobe's Photoshop and Acrobat, can exploit the advantages of a dual-core CPU, but multithreaded applications are scarce outside the spheres of digital content development, graphics, and digital video.

Any program that has you regularly "staring at an hourglass," says Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst for Insight 64, is a candidate to become a multithreaded application in the future. "But I'd be surprised if many mainstream office applications were converted in the near future," he adds.

When multiple applications are running, however, a dual-core system will greatly benefit mainstream business users, according to Brookwood. Routine chores, like scanning for viruses or defragmenting a hard drive, can run in the background without slowing everyday work tasks.

Overall, our dual-core test results are consistent with the outcomes of other PC World performance tests, which historically have shown systems built around AMD processors outperforming similarly configured machines built with Intel processors.

One possible explanation for AMD's superior performance is the design of the AMD dual-core processors. Intel took the "quickest path to market," says Jim McGregor, principal analyst with In-Stat, "and crammed two Pentium 4 Prescott cores onto a single die rather than designing a dual-core chip from the ground up [as AMD did]."