Its worth it. I was a beta tester and I’ve been using it for a few months. Even though you won’t have the core advantage, your renders will speed up about 50%.
I loaded the beta version on one of our machines (dual 2.7 4.5 gigs of ram OS10.4) and the increase was about 50%. I’m running Pro on a quadcore 2.5 with 8 gigs of memory, and it smokes, and I have nucleo standard on my dualcore Macbook pro with 2 gigs of memory running Windows XP pro, somehow the laptop keeps up with the quad until it comes to MASSIVE scenes, and then I memory out. (Btw — I say scenes because I’m working on an animated series — and we needed a way cut our render times down from around 24-36 hours without opening the network — so I tried nucleo and it solved the problem)
However, I’ve come to realize the strongpoint of the softwarae is the Background render — you can just keep loading the queue and keep rendering all bloody day.
You should have bought it two months ago, when it was only 300 bucks.