The Glade 4.0

Comp specs:
C2D e6600, OC'd to 3.24ghz
8gb DDR2 RAM, 825hz (I believe)
Geforce 8800GTX 768mb
Dual screens, one 27", one 42", both at 1920x1080

1080p video stutters slightly, but noticeably. Same videos tested on my roommate's comp (i7, 6gb ddr3, gtx 295) without the stutter. FRAPS shows my video to be running at 24fps, same as his, so this is leading me to believe it's more of a CPU bottleneck than anything else. Task manager puts my VLC player at ~30-50% cpu usage during playback.

Roomie has offered to sell me his old core2 quad for $50. Think this'll fix my issue? Worth it?

Doubtful. I would be surprised if the media player you're using is capable of using more than a single core for its process. I'm not all that familiar with what Windows can do, but can you see the utilization % per core?

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Yes, the built in Performance Monitor in Windows Task Manager will display per-core utilization.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

The VLC support claims it is heavily multi-threaded.

I just opened a hi-rez Xvid using VLC 1.0.1 and the task manager shows it to be using multiple cores.