Okay i am going to get that mobo right now i am looking around at AMD CPUS and seeing if i can find a good one that is either equivalent to the i3 or a quad core and is cheaper than the i3.
it's really up to you, the core performance of a i3 is better than it's amd counter part, but you can get a quad for the same price if you go amd and software that takes advantages of 4 core get more speed from amd.
bench (
phenom 2 X4 955 VS
i3 2100) : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/88?vs=289
On the plus side for amd, their cpu are unlocked, they can easily be overclocked to close the gap when it comes to core performance.
If you look at this article, you'll see that the cpu you choose when it comes to gaming, doesn't really matter as most games are bottlenecked by the gpu anyway ( even with a hd7970), for the few games where the cpu has a stronger impact (satrcraft 2), you don't see a segregation between dual and quad cores because actual games doesn't take advantage of quad cores.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-fx-pentium-apu-benchmark,3120.html
the choice is this:
amd: quad from day 1, easy overclock (fx series has high OC potential) to close the performance gap. (12 core announced for next year)
Intel: cheap dual core today, upgrade to a quad next year (or the one after) - more core speed.
quad core optimized games: although some are starting to appear on the market, I don't think they'll be common for the coming year and dual core cpu should be able to run them without penalty. Quad core may become a necessity in 3 years from now, but the amd quad available today may not perform fast enough by then (far projection - hard to say exactly, from my experience of the past 10 years).
the question is whether the other things you do with your computer or the way you use it will take advantage of a quad core or not.