Sure, but it's 2core HT

I thought HT offers crippled performance compared to a real core because of sharing a lot of resources within the physical cores. Can a HT logical core really count as a physical core when hosting a VM on it ? I'd love to hear your experience, because I will be upgrading PC soon from an old AMD Phenom and am hesitant to count HT as a real benefit.

It depends, but I'm doing a lot of compilation and playback of videos, and the bottleneck is now more and more I/O and RAM than pure CPU speed.