You will only really notice the difference while video editing or rendering 3D scene's (or any number of other multi threaded programs). In day to day tasks you will hardly notice it... Even in gaming it shouldn't be too far behind.
Also those sb's love to be overclocked. So the matter of being "monumentally stupid" all depends if you actually need the extra power.
Thanks for the input Dantrag.
I have noticed on the performance tab in task manager that hyperthreading kicks in, shown by more than 4 threads being used, when simply surfing the net, or playing videos on VLC Media Player, and quite a few other programs.
Even so, it probably is a bit of over-kill in terms of what the main PC is used for. However, I want as fast a machine as I can get for everyday use, without getting into the $1,000 range for a CPU. As was pointed out by Cap'n Cranky, speed of performance can be rate limited by certain applications, like MS Office 2010 Word, for example. It's slow no matter what's opening it. And ditto for optical drives.
I guess my preferences have been biased toward hyperthreading since the change in speed seen when single solid cores first became hyperthreading, which if my memory serves me right, was about 10 years ago. Then came dual core, followed by core 2 duo with 4 hypertheads, and accompanying increased performance with each new model.
So my thinking was, if 4 solid cores are good, then 4 solid cores with 8 hyperthreads should be better. But then that has to be balanced with a later version architecture in the cores of i5.
Having said that, with SATA3 SSD hard drives, and USB3 external HD storage, speeds can be quite blisering. I have all my personal data on a 2nd storage partiton on my main HD on a Corsair 128GB SATA3 SSD. It takes exactly 27 seconds to drag/drop 3.07GB of music files from the storage partition to the GUI. I've also got an Acronis image of Win7 with all programs loaded, (but no personal data), in the storage partition.
In the event of a total crash of the OS, it takes about 7 minutes using Acronis to restore the pristine image of Win7 which occupies 28.3GB. And about another 2 or 3 minutes to drag/drop all my personal data into the GUI, which includes Favorites, Contacts, email accounts imported, etc ... leaving the originals intact on the storage partition. Then add to that whatever time it takes to get updates for Windows and 3rd party programs.
From go to whoa that means the fully loaded OS can be restored in about 14 - 15 minutes. And that beats the hell out of doing a clean install.