Minimum Requirements - Are they bullshit?

[bystander]

Not really. It just allows the two cores to have a combined total of four threads.

I'm not an expert in this area, but I am pretty sure that the performance impact of having 2 cores + 2 HT is much less than 2 cores + 2 cores.

They perform better than that, but not as good as 4 cores.

Most games have only 1 thread that needs a lot of power, then a couple small threads. HT seems to deal with the majority of games just fine as a result.