On Tue, 24 Jun 2014 12:25:34 +0100 Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk allegedly wrote:
On 19 June 2014 17:03, Mark Rogers mark@quarella.co.uk wrote:
I'd like to upgrade the motherboard and processor (and the RAM if necessary) whilst retaining the rest of the box. What would be a good motherboard and CPU combo for the above on a budget of say £150-£200?
Given the silence I guess I'm not playing to people's strengths here!
Can I therefore narrow this down: What CPU would be recommended for a good low-energy-when-idle but good-performance-when-needed, at around the £100 mark? (I'm flexible on price so if there's a compelling reason to spend more I'll consider it.)
Mark
"That depends" (TM). How low powered and what sort of performance?
I've been looking at much the same question myself lately. My last PC build (about a year ago) was based on an AMD A4 3400 2.7GHz Socket FM1 and an Asrock A75M-HVS FM1 mobo. But that was for a headless server designed to replace (and consolidate) a bunch of other assorted NAS boxes and small ARM servers. (Note to Laurie - that machine idles at 45 watts with two 2 TB SATA drives installed in RAID 1 if that is any help). My current desktop (around 4 years old and thus due for renewal) is based on a core i3-530.
I chose the AMD A4 because I didn't need a lot of oomph for a server and the price/performance looked good (£62 for CPU and Mobo). Arguably it is really overpowered for what it does but I've been happy with it. It is also pretty damned quiet.
However, intel processors now generally run at much lower power consumption than AMD. Current conventional wisdom at the high end (gaming PCs) is that the Core i5/i7 beats any of the A6/A8/A10 or FX series AMD processors hands down. The FX 9xxx has a TDP of 219 watts for pete's sake. Even lower down the performance scale Intel seems to have AMD beat on power consumption. I'm not a gamer, but I do a lot of video transcoding so I'm considering one of the new Core i5s - possibly the latest Haswell series such as the core i5-4670 on a Z87M Socket 1150 mobo.
But if anyone else has a better suggestion for my use case I'd be delighted to hear it.
Mick ---------------------------------------------------------------------
Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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