CPU Upgrade .... comments?

[blade]

Originally Posted by Crashless

$1300!? You can get a apg/ddr/core 2 mb for $46:

There is no way I'd buy a PC Chips motherboard. Especially for anything HTPC related.

[doc]

Originally Posted by blade

There is no way I'd buy a PC Chips motherboard. Especially for anything HTPC related.

I agree, for the sake a few extra bucks its worth buying a good brand motherboard. I've seen too many problems with budget ones.

[rickgillyon]

Originally Posted by blade

There is no way I'd buy a PC Chips motherboard.

I don't know, they have their positive points. I do PC repairs for beer money (on top of my software development work), and without PC Chips motherboards going wrong I'd have been drinking a lot less.

I don't replace them with PC Chips, I have some morals...

[davephan]

Another option to increase performance on your main HTPC system is to offload some of the jobs to other computers. I tried off loading commerical skip processing to an older P3 333 MHz computer. It reduced the load quite a bit from the main computer, but it takes a long time to process each file, since it is such a slow computer. The video transcoding could also be off loaded from your main computer (if you transcode all your video files to DivX).

However, if you have several old clunker computers running jobs like that (in a seldomly used room - to keep the noise isolated), then it would still cost you something for the extra electricity for the extra computers to run 24 x 7.

Dave

[insomniac]

In this case, it sounds like the only cheap/realistic option would be to attempt an overclock on his present chip and see if it works. Otherwise, i would recommend what others are. But a new mobo, RAM and a pentium D chip.

Originally Posted by blade

What would you suggest he get? The fastest cpu available for the socket 754 was an Athlon 64 3700 clawhammer, which doesn't seem readily available anymore. The only Venice core for the 754 appears to be the 3000. Remember it is a newer core than the 3200, 3400, and 3700s that were available for the 754 platform. You're assuming that a higher PR rated, older & larger core will yield better overclocking than the smaller, newer, and more energy efficient Venice. The only advantage IMO of the 3700 in this case is the greater L2 cache.

If he can get a reasonably priced 3700 great, but if not IMO the Venice 3000 should be able to yield as good if not better results than anything else available for the socket except for the Turion.

If you read up on overclocking of the Venice chips you'll see practically all of them will do at least 2.4ghz, which would put them at around a 3600 on the 754 platform. Reaching 2.6ghz is pretty common as well.