G I too am a software engineer and I can say my recent upgrade to dual
G core was a waste of time for software development. Visual Studio 2005
G doesn't make use of both cores during a compile

it can do that if you compile more than one project (if your solution
contains lots of projects, that happens really frequently).
other build tools can use multiple cores too. you can use Incredibuild for
MSVC builds.

if you use 'make' for builds, you can set 'concurrency' paramters to
parallel build process as much as you wish.

I have never heard of Incredibuild before - thanks for the tip. I do
use make though for embedded builds and as you say, it can be used to
give multiple build threads which should make effective use of
multiple processors. I have also found it useful to set the processor
affinity for the debugged task and the IDE to use different CPUs.
This aids responsivity a lot under some circumstances

None of this really answers my question though as I'm still looking
for the answer as to which motherboard and processor combination hits
the current sweet spot in terms of price / performance for multi-chip
multi core ?

Thanks,

Mike