What's my bottleneck and what's the best upgrade path?

[hardwareguy15]

for my 2 cents, if your pc is used mainly as a home cinema pc, i would go for an intel T series chip (much lower power consumption)

for AES support you will need an I5 or above

as a cpu benchmark i don't have a good one but i do have one - my sandy bridge 2100T stock does appx 3000kbps using the winrar benchmark , i'm not sure what your current rig can achieve but going by this i think the current generation haswell i5 T series process will be significantly faster

the cpu onboard graphics will be more than enough too (unless you want to game)

[scaryjim]

the cpu onboard graphics will be more than enough too (unless you want to game)

Forgot to mention that because it's an HTPC I run everything through my HD TV, so all gaming should be done at 1920x1080

*ahem*

I'm currently running a 3 generation old A6-3670k as my HTPC, which also doubles as a family gaming machine (TF2, XCom, Skyrim etc.) and it handles all of those at 1080p low settings relatively easily.

A Richland or Kaveri A10 will be a bit better than the Q6600 in the CPU department, but will definitely be slower than an HD4890 in games. OTOH, you get much better instruction support, DX11, and - importantly for an HTPC (IMNSHO, anyway) - *much* lower power consumption. Your current rig at idle will draw more power than an APU rig running flat out. If you actually want a performance upgrade you still need a discrete GPU - a Radeon 7790/R7 260X would do the job (they're basically the same card), or the 7850/R9 270 would be a big jump. Really it's down to whether it's more a gaming machine or an HTPC - you can go for a cheap, small, quiet (although you'll need an aftermarket cooler rather than the AMD stock one), low power HTPC that's "good enough" for gaming, or spend more on a small but powerful gaming rig that you happen to use for HTPC duties.

If you're looking at Kaveri you'll definitely want DDR3-2400 capable memory, and perhaps even faster: the relatively large GPU portion is going to need all the memory bandwidth you can throw at it on a dual channel DDR3 platform. No matter how fast the DDR3 you throw at it memory's still going to be the deciding factor in how fast Kaveri's GPU is. But it all depends on how important gaming is and what you consider acceptable performance.

[Lee H]

If you can, try upping the FSB on the Q6600 from its lowly 266 MHz to either 333 MHz or at a push even 450 MHz (you might need to drop a multiplier so it's running at 3.6 GHz)

I did this with my Q6600 and found that it expanded its lifespan a little, but the design of the CPU with the FSB is what's holding it back.