Which cpu?

[Pob255]

I'm planning on a new mini-ITX build soon in this http://www.ebuyer.com/696381-element...er-case-atomic

This is for my other-half as her workshop pc.

main uses are going to be internet, email and unfortunately photo editing.

The current one she's using is an old Q6600, 4gb ram and a passive 5450 or 6450

What I'm thinking is an AMD A8-xxxx on an ASRock A68 motherboard https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASROCK-A68M.../dp/B01CK7K4E2

I'm just not sure which A8 cpu, the 7600 the 7650k or the 7670k

I was also considering the AM1 Athlon 5370, it would be a cheaper system, looking at some benchmarks it's got similar office/web benchmarks as the old core2quad q6600 (which us a bit insane when you think about it )
However I'm not sure on the photo editing side, I'd much prefer this to be an upgrade not a newer side grade.
EDIT: anyone with experience of the AM1 Athlon 5370 ?? would be good to get impressions of it.

An i3 haswell + H81 board based system would be the other option, but that's at least £50 more.
i5 would be nice but that's £100 over the amd a8

[Bagnaj97]

An i3 haswell + H81 board based system would be the other option, but that's at least £50 more.
i5 would be nice but that's £100 over the amd a8

i3-6100 (skylake) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-BX806.../dp/B015VPX2EO
H110 itx board https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-H110I-.../dp/B018SMJJH6
£161.67

On Amazon at least, the A8-7670k is cheaper than the lesser chips!
A8-7670k https://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-A8-7670.../dp/B011BD60S0
Your linked mobo https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASROCK-A68M.../dp/B01CK7K4E2
£131.91

£30 difference, but FM2+ doesn't have any decent upgrade options later down the line.
i3-6100 should be faster too - This compares it to the A10-7870k http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/a10-7...00-cpu-review/

Edit: i3-6100t is about the same price on Amazon and is lower power (35 vs 51W, 3.2 vs 3.7GHz). Even better for an ITX case?

[scaryjim]

I think you need a bit more definition on the "photo editing" side. AFAIK that's only going to be compute-intensive if she's running a lot of filters etc.

The AM1 APUs all use GCN which should give good OpenCL acceleration if her editing software can make use of it. They have 128 GCN shaders so they're pretty capable (roughly equivalent to a 6450, which iirc has 160 VLIW5 shaders).

If you decide to go for an A8 APU I wouldn't look past the 7600 personally - the only advantage the other have is a slightly higher clock speed and for the tasks you've mentioned I don't think that's going to be worth spending more on - in real terms the 7670 isn't going to do "more" than the 7600 -it'll do the same things ever so slightly faster.

[shaithis]

I've got a 5150 and while I haven't tried photo editing on it, I do use it as a HTPC and do office tasks on it, it hasn't felt slow yet.

For the price difference, I'd err on the side of that for now and see what happens in the new year if her editing tasks get heavier!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What software is she running??

You might need to factor in the cost of an SSD.

[EndlessWaves]

That's a big case for a Mini-ITX build if you don't need the massive graphics card and CPU cooler. It's worth considering smaller models, ebuyer sell some Antec and In Win cases that are half to a quarter of the size.


In CPU terms the Pentium branded configurations of the Skylake desktop dual-core are the Intel equivalent both price and performance-wise.

A G4500 has the same HD 530 graphics as the 6100 giving it 80-90% of the graphics performance of a 7600 and it's at least as fast on average CPU-wise. Plus you get all the cutting edge technologies like HEVC decoding.

In terms of cheaper alternatives I wouldn't touch the small core options if performance is more important than power consumption. Even the cheapest sub-3Ghz £30-40 Haswell/Skylake Celeron will smash them into the ground:
http://www.techspot.com/review/806-a...l-d/page4.html
http://www.techspot.com/review/882-i...itx/page4.html

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I tend to a reasonable amount of photography with a D600,so can you tell me the packages will be run,Pob??

Focusing on CPU only is not really useful,as I/O is just as much a consideration IMHO.

[Pob255]

i3-6100 (skylake) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Intel-BX806.../dp/B015VPX2EO
H110 itx board https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-H110I-.../dp/B018SMJJH6
£161.67

I must admit I discounted skylake because of ddr4 costs, at least last time I looked at it.
Also I need to double check but I think I've got some ddr3 I can use so a skylake build adds in the cost of ram.

On Amazon at least, the A8-7670k is cheaper than the lesser chips!
A8-7670k https://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-A8-7670.../dp/B011BD60S0
Your linked mobo https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASROCK-A68M.../dp/B01CK7K4E2
£131.91

I was looking at scan where it's a few quid cheaper and an a8-7600 which brings it down to £124 (ps the motherboard is back in stock at scan now)

£30 difference, but FM2+ doesn't have any decent upgrade options later down the line.
i3-6100 should be faster too - This compares it to the A10-7870k http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/a10-7...00-cpu-review/

Edit: i3-6100t is about the same price on Amazon and is lower power (35 vs 51W, 3.2 vs 3.7GHz). Even better for an ITX case?

unfortunately if I do have ram then that's going to shift the price difference closer to £70

ps I've got a 120gb ssd for this, I'm going to need to add in a psu and an ips monitor
Other half says her current pc is "fine" for the photo's she's editing, it's for her shop&etsy shop https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/TheLastKult
She's using an old 19" tv atm and really needs an IPS

software is mainly her old copy of ps-cs2 might upgrade to cc at some point.
OS will be w7 64bit (she's still on xp atm, this is also an excuse to get her off it.)

@EndlessWaves it's not about performance vs power consumption, more price vs performance and getting something that's fast enough for as cheap as I can so money can be put into other places/need to save up less money so can get this done sooner.

EDIT: that's another area we could put the money into a decent camera, she's using an old Sony Mavica MVC-CD500, that writes to mini-cdrw not memory and the battery isn't in the best of shape, it's got a decent lens and sensor though.

EDIT2: the fact that the Athlon 5370 + motherboard is only £70 is very tempting, 8gb of ddr3 over her current 3.5gb ish ddr2 (4gb but xp) and an ssd should give it a bit of a kick over her current setup.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So why don't you re-use what you have now,add some more RAM and the SSD??

Or is space a consideration??

Have you considered a secondhand CPU?? You might be able to pick up a socket 1150 mini-ITX motherboard and a Core i3 4100 series CPU for not much over £100.

CCL Computers do offer Paypal Credit over 12 months if you spend £199:

https://www.cclonline.com/page/paypal-credit-faqs/

Edit!!

You will need to check the voltage of the DDR3 too.

[Pob255]

I'm sort of in love with that case btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gad98utK640 it's the same one, so not the smallest, but not too big, it uses an atx psu and it's a great price for what it is.

my other option would probably be the Cooltek U1 or Lian-Li PC-Q07B but they are £10 more

[Pob255]

Well this is a 2nd pc for work, I have offered her my old pob laptop or even my newer samsung 530u but she really doesn't like laptops.

On Ram she's using my old p35 motherboard and xp so capped at 4gb and doesn't want me to "mess about" with her current pc.
In my old antec p180

Really if it wasn't for the photoshop I'd happily build an AM1 system for her, if it's as good/slightly better than the current q6600, I know the a8 will be a decent bump in performance.

ps cannot remember if I over clocked it or not, might be at 2.8ghz or 2.66ghz

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Thats cheap for an aluminium case.

Regarding CC,for PS and LR 5.3 it seems probably core count and cache does make a different upto a degree,and HT less of a difference.

Having said that the tests I have seen are like 30 to 40 RAWs off a D800,etc.

Looking at what you are doing,it might be somewhat of a lighter workload.

I suspect maybe this motherboard for around £57:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gigabyte-GA...words=1150+itx

Then look on Ebay for a secondhand Core i3 4000 series CPU for around £50?? 4 reasonably fast threads and should be generally fine for a bit of multi-tasking.

Skylake can work with DDR3,but IIRC it needs to be lower voltage stuff(need to check up on that).

[Pob255]

Skylake can work with DDR3,but IIRC it needs to be lower voltage stuff(need to check up on that).

only if the motherboard supports it.

I need too look through my boxes to see if I've got some spare ddr3, moved to birmingham so all my stuff is still mainly in boxes.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

only if the motherboard supports it.

I need too look through my boxes to see if I've got some spare ddr3, moved to birmingham so all my stuff is still mainly in boxes.

It might be worth checking out the CCL Paypal thingy - 12 months for £199 should be enough to get you the monitor,PSU and some other bits.

Haswell/Skylake does offer a better upgrade path though. Its hard to judge whether an Intel Pentium/Core i3 or AMD A8 would be better,as all the CS and LR 5 stuff tends to be focussed around RAW conversion from high MP dSLRs using a few dozen files.

An Intel Pentium might be fine for what is being done,although I do tend to prefer 4 reasonably fast threads for multi-tasking.

I do remember having my Q6600 based rig when using Vista too and TBH,it was perfectly fine when I was doing a bit of RAW conversion from old A200 dSLR(10 MP).

Having an SSD is good and I would aim for 8GB of RAM if possible.

I did notice the A6 3670K system I have,did start to get bogged down a bit under Windows 8 with 4GB of RAM,but 8GB its pretty smooth.

[scaryjim]

... moved to birmingham ....

Excellent plan

I think you really need to nail down how compute-intensive her PS workflow is. Looking at the etsy it's mostly manual retouching and simple effects. I suspect the only system bottlenecks to that will be memory and IO, so plenty of RAM (possibly worth considering 16GB) and an SSD should help more than a fast CPU (imo; worth remembering photo editing isn't my speciality ).

I'll be honest, I'm struggling to see any good reason to spend money on anything faster than AM1, and the money saved could go towards a new monitor, or camera, or a host of other things (I suspect you've for lots of extraneous expenses to meet having recently moved house, for instance).

[Pob255]

Excellent plan

I think you really need to nail down how compute-intensive her PS workflow is. Looking at the etsy it's mostly manual retouching and simple effects. I suspect the only system bottlenecks to that will be memory and IO, so plenty of RAM (possibly worth considering 16GB) and an SSD should help more than a fast CPU (imo; worth remembering photo editing isn't my speciality ).

I'll be honest, I'm struggling to see any good reason to spend money on anything faster than AM1, and the money saved could go towards a new monitor, or camera, or a host of other things (I suspect you've for lots of extraneous expenses to meet having recently moved house, for instance).

yes it's not massively complex stuff she does and there is a lot of retouching, although there's some compression on etsy's end that often messes up all the work she does she doesn't mess around with raw files.

And yes there are lots of other expenses, we've got to buy a load of bookcases, our study is triangular and she's bagsied the 90 degree corner so I'm going to need a desk that that'll fit into a 60ish degree angle.
So this pc is not the highest thing on the agenda, just trying to plan for it and sort out the costs.