keep Athlon II X2 250 or upgrade for HTPC

[RobTi]

Hi need some help with the above will be used mainly as a HTPC with some gaming.

So have a ssd for os, a hard drive for media, 12Gb ram (for ram drive) and 5450 for graphics.

So if i keep cpu all i need is a new motherboard, or sell the cpu and go for new cpu\ motherboard.

I was hoping that FM2 would have been out by now but that doesn't look like happening.

So what would you recommend

Thanks

Robert

[Pob255]

for an htpc the athlonII x2 will be fine, not sure you'd need to bother with a ram drive if you've already got an SSD or for an HTPC, ram drives are generally good for thing that normally do a lot of hard drive caching.

the 5450 should be fine for htpc but gaming it'll struggle, depends on what sort of games.

[RobTi]

Thanks what I meant was that I had this left over from my previous build, I used the ram drive for timeshifting files and don't mind upgrading the graphics later on.

So I was looking for advice on wether to stick with the CPU or upgrade to a new CPU/board

Robert

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Stick with what you have for the time being??

I assume you have seen this review of the A10-5800K:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/a10-58...-32463-15.html

The 65W TDP A10-5700 looks quite interesting,although I suspect it will Turbo less often than the A10-5800K.

[RobTi]

Thanks was hoping that they would be out sooner.

Will start looking for a board then and keep this for a few more months

[will101]

I noticed a big (well, noticeable!) speed difference between using an Athlon X2 235e (2.7GHz, dual core, 45W TDP) processor and an Athlon X3 435 (2.9GHz, triple core 95W TDP) in the same HTPC system even though the chache sizes are bigger on the lower clocked low TDP processor. Windows7 and Media Centre in particular was much more responsive with the 3 core processor.

I'd be interested how much more responsive the SSD made the OS as some actions at startup are quite hard drive intensive such as opening the TV guide

[dirky]

Depends what you are using for the OS and media player, but that CPU should he fine. Any decoding should be on the gpu...

[King Jay]

Keep it, it will be fine. The GPU is more important for a HTPC.