Hi Gobble,
I wanted to run multiple virtual instances ( 4 or more instances ) without my system crashing down and hence went for this type of config (with 4 cores rather than Hyper Threading), i really dint bother about my chipset at that time to be frank..good to know that your chipset also supports virtualization
cheers
Prashant
OT but can't help it - I used to run 6 VMs on a single core athlonXP with 768MB RAM . How?!! Minimal freeBSD running Quagga routing suite - in 48MB ram nd 512mb disk each.
I use the Quad core at office - really smooth experience.
Enjoy

Cheers