I wanted a no-frills low-to-midrange gaming friendly workhorse CPU so that more money could be put to the GPU, and this CPU is pretty much it (today's games are still more sensitive to clocks than number of cores). It's not the fastest nor cheapest, but it does give you the best performance/price ratio, as far as Intel processors go currently. The next serious step would be a Core i5, but that is significantly more expensive and can help only if you do video editing or heavy compiling, while going any cheaper would net you a much weaker CPU with minimal additional savings. The stock cooler is not much but as this CPU has a locked multiplier, it makes little difference. As a 1155 socket CPU it also opens up the possibility of buying this CPU now, and then upgrading to a stronger one (Ivy Bridge) in a year or so provided your motherboards' BIOS supports it.