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Mind some advice friend? Look at the AMD hexas, especially the Phenom IIs, you can score them crazy cheap if you look around and can get a damned good gaming board from a company like Asrock (Asus and Asrock are one now BTW, with the Asus side mainly laptop and Asrock mainly desktop) for dirt cheap, really great way to get a nice gaming rig for little green. Pair it with an HD7750 or HD7770, hell get a CF enabled board like mine and by this fall you'll be able to score double HD7750s for around $120 and you'll be smoking.

But do NOT toss that Athlon X2 system, still plenty of uses for that baby. You can underclock it and it'll make a great low power HTPC or you can go to starmicro and either squeeze some more performance out by getting a cheap upgrade or if you want to go the HTPC route I'd recommend the 4850E which is just 45w at 2.5Ghz so it makes a great whisper quiet HTPC. Slap the old board into something like one of the cheap VCR style cases on amazon and tada! Slick HTPC that looks great and runs like a champ!

I have to say having the hardware cycle slow down has been fine by me, i can still sell plenty of HTPCs and having the GPU turnover slow down means its cheaper than ever to give my customers a gaming upgrade. Hell me and my boys have been gaming the last 3 years on HD4850s, they cost just $60 a pop at the time (and can be found for as little as $35 online now) and despite our love of shooters they have been kicking the behind. I'll be upgrading us to the HD7750s or HD7770s this fall NOT because our games need it but simply for the power savings, not having to blow $100+ a GPU times three every other year has certainly been fine by me ;-)

Mind some advice friend? Look at the AMD hexas, especially the Phenom IIs, you can score them crazy cheap if you look around and can get a damned good gaming board from a company like Asrock (Asus and Asrock are one now BTW, with the Asus side mainly laptop and Asrock mainly desktop) for dirt cheap, really great way to get a nice gaming rig for little green. Pair it with an HD7750 or HD7770, hell get a CF enabled board like mine and by this fall you'll be able to score double HD7750s for around $120 and you'll be smoking.

But do NOT toss that Athlon X2 system, still plenty of uses for that baby. You can underclock it and it'll make a great low power HTPC or you can go to starmicro and either squeeze some more performance out by getting a cheap upgrade or if you want to go the HTPC route I'd recommend the 4850E which is just 45w at 2.5Ghz so it makes a great whisper quiet HTPC. Slap the old board into something like one of the cheap VCR style cases on amazon and tada! Slick HTPC that looks great and runs like a champ!

I have to say having the hardware cycle slow down has been fine by me, i can still sell plenty of HTPCs and having the GPU turnover slow down means its cheaper than ever to give my customers a gaming upgrade. Hell me and my boys have been gaming the last 3 years on HD4850s, they cost just $60 a pop at the time (and can be found for as little as $35 online now) and despite our love of shooters they have been kicking the behind. I'll be upgrading us to the HD7750s or HD7770s this fall NOT because our games need it but simply for the power savings, not having to blow $100+ a GPU times three every other year has certainly been fine by me ;-)

I avoid Intel since the bribery and compiler rigging came out, but if anybody wants a killer chip for an HTPC go to Starmicro and pick up one of the cheap ULV AMDs. You can pick up an Athlon X2 ULV for $33 bucks and AM3 boards are plentiful, or if you find a good deal on an AM2 board the Phenom I quad ULVs are like $65 and both make kicking HTPC chips.

But in either case the X86 units are just waaay more flexible, I even had a customer that had to wait a week for a part simply move his bobcat based HTPC into his office and use it for the wait, made a great little office box. In fact that is my biggest use for Bobcats ATM, you can swap out one of those powerhog P4s for a bobcat and get better performance than the P4 while using less power under load than the P4s did just idling. Heck grab one with a PCI slot on board and a cheap IDE card and they can keep all their old hardware, be it IDE or SATA, no worries. that kind of flexability is just damned nice to have, and for HTPCs the Bobcats and ULV AMD chips run great while keeping the costs down over the i series chips.

I avoid Intel since the bribery and compiler rigging came out, but if anybody wants a killer chip for an HTPC go to Starmicro and pick up one of the cheap ULV AMDs. You can pick up an Athlon X2 ULV for $33 bucks and AM3 boards are plentiful, or if you find a good deal on an AM2 board the Phenom I quad ULVs are like $65 and both make kicking HTPC chips.

But in either case the X86 units are just waaay more flexible, I even had a customer that had to wait a week for a part simply move his bobcat based HTPC into his office and use it for the wait, made a great little office box. In fact that is my biggest use for Bobcats ATM, you can swap out one of those powerhog P4s for a bobcat and get better performance than the P4 while using less power under load than the P4s did just idling. Heck grab one with a PCI slot on board and a cheap IDE card and they can keep all their old hardware, be it IDE or SATA, no worries. that kind of flexability is just damned nice to have, and for HTPCs the Bobcats and ULV AMD chips run great while keeping the costs down over the i series chips.

Yep,same here partner. With older boxes so plentiful and cheap (Go on any Craigslist and keep an eye out and its not hard to find an Athlon X2 or C2D, or go to Starmicro and pick up one of those cheap Phenom I ULV chips) the hassle of trying to run both server AND HTPC is frankly too much hassle and not worth the effort, not when you can remote into the box to set up the jobs and have it setting in a corner somewhere.

And frankly most of the recording software quality wise hasn't changed much since the Win9X days as far as stability, too many times it'll choke if you try to do too much at once so it really is better to just use something like the bobcat for the player and have the recording and storage on a box in a corner somewhere. of course if you are just ripping your DVDs, streaming or downloading from the net this doesn't apply but recording TV is one of those jobs where its better to have a dedicated system for the job.

Dude pick up an ATI HD4850, you can pick those up for like $35 if you look around. I am running one and I can tell you all my games run GREAT in Win 7, I can fire up Just Cause II and do the whole "cool guys don't look at explosions" bit, Batman AA and AC run great, the Borderland series run fine, its no problem.

If you want something faster and have a little bit more green an HD7750 runs close to the 6850s while using half the power and again runs great in windows 7. XP is nearly 14 years old man, hell it can't even take a full 3GB of RAM if you have a decent amount of VRAM on your GPU, if my GF's Pentium D can run Win 7 (slapped in an HD2400XT,cost a grand total of $9) then so can your PC.

A final bit of advice, go to Starmicro and pick up a dual core if that board will support it, hell I've had pretty decent luck getting AM2 boards to take the MOR Athlon 64 X2s even if the board's chiplist don't show one and their chips are cheap enough you can afford to take the chance. I've been buying from those guys for years, great bunch and they'll have a chip for just about any socket. You'd be surprised how little money it takes to turn your system into a pretty kicking Windows 7 machine, and the increased security and extra features are WELL worth the upgrade. When I use XP now I feel like I've gone back to Win95, how I lived without jumplists and breadcrumbs is beyond me. Well worth a few bucks friend.

I went with a 1035T myself when those hit $100. Runs at 2.6 when all cores are in use and ramps up to 3.1 when I'm playing most games so i get the best of both worlds, a fast triple for gaming and a full hexacore for video transcoding or editing my multitrack recordings. of course the fact that I can (and have on several occasions) play a game AND transcode a video AND burn a DVD certainly helped make up my mind ;-)

But I see no point in going with the "half core" chips, i really don't, as the bang for the buck just isn't there and as you noted they are power pigs. in tests they had to get the half cores a full 1GHz higher than the Phenom II chips to beat the Phenom and of course adding that kind of OCing makes it just belch heat and go through power like a drunk hitting a free minibar. honestly i'm glad that they got the game console gigs because hopefully that will give them the needed capital to get rid of the half core design and get something better, maybe as that article I posted suggested and going back to the K8 the way Intel went back to the P3 to make the Core.

Luckily thanks to the long life of the AM socket neither me nor my customers HAVE to go with the half core, as there is plenty of AM3 and AM3+ Phenoms and Athlons for sale and frankly THAT is where the bang for the buck is right now not only in AMDLand but IntelLand as well, you can get an Athlon triple for around $45 that has a better than 3 in 4 chance of unlocking the fourth core. I mean a triple with a great chance at getting a quad, for less than $50? Not to mention the 1045T chips are selling for just $89, that is crazy cheap for 6 full cores.

BTW if you ever decide you'd like a faster chip check out StarMicro as I can't say enough good things about them. Been buying chips from them for a couple of years now, never a bad chip and fast shipping, in fact I have an Athlon X2 ULV coming the first of next week from them so I can retire that aging Sempron I use as a nettop at the shop. as you can see they sell both Intel and AMD and go back several sockets so its easy to take an older machine and give it a nice kick in the pants.

But I agree that while APUs have their place they just aren't suitable for every task and Intel is trying to stuff those things into places where they do NOT belong just so they can squeeze more $$$ out of the consumer. Considering the lead they have on chips trying to bleed more money out of the consumer seems extra dickish to me, but then again Intel has never been a nice company.

Dude if you want to run crypto that the E350 won't run and can't find the card? Fine get an A-Series, you can get one shipped for like $65 for a triple that'll run any damned thing you want. Hell if you don't mind getting an older model you can get E series ULV quad for $68.

As for the drop in card? Its been over a year since I looked at one dude, i don't really run into much use for heavy crypto now that I quit doing corp jobs. IIRC I found 'em by looking up "cell accelerator board" but right now I'm trying to deal with this PLUS 2 chat windows PLUS a nephew bugging my ass to take him to the store so i REALLY don't have time to Google it for you. If you want to know about the card from what I remember it used the same chip as the PS3 along with 512Mb of RAM on a drop in card and was for doing crypto on low power servers, you know, like having a low power webserver that could handle crypto jobs without cranking the TDP. Naturally since that's a teeny tiny niche they didn't do well but the cards are still out there if you want 'em. A MUCH easier card to find that would give you the same benefits would be one of the PhysX cards that was made before that company got bought out by Nvidia, thanks to CUDA you can write programs for it just like for any chip and since its pretty much a math co-processor having it do crypto shouldn't be hard. Math is math after all and those things were math cranking monsters.

But again this whole thread started because somebody said the Pi could do it which surely to God even you will admit that isn't possible, the Pi is good for little jobs, not video processing. With X86 there is so many fucking choices out there that it isn't funny...fuck it just hit me, why not just buy one of the Via based carputers? THAT solves ALL of your problems with the E350 since Via has hardware accelerated crypto baked into the chip and has since the C7. You can pick up one of those for less than $200, use its hardware acceleration to do any crypto you want (IIRC its designed primarily for AES but I'm sure others will run) and there ya go, Bob's your uncle.

So quit using the crap DVRs that came with your contract and go DIY? You can get a Phenom low power quad for $68 at Starmicro and VCR style cases that will hold a mATX board really ain't that hard to find friend. I've built a couple of DVRs using this chip and they are low heat while giving you plenty of CPU for processing video and with a DIY you can choose to either have a DVD burner in the system or a second HDD, you can take a 32GB-64GB SSD and use that as a temp drive which will give you plenty of throughput for video and then simply move the recording to the larger 5400 RPM internal.

Frankly building a DVR has never been easier and cheaper, hell it one of the few places where Windows 8 actually makes sense as metro makes a great 10 foot UI for a DVR and its optimized for speed, its really not hard and at the end of the day you'll have a much nicer system that YOU control and can do with what you will.

Well if you go to StarMicro you can get the 5600+ X2 for $58, that is a 2.9GHz and is probably the cheapest you are gonna get with enough speed to do basic gaming.

That said if it were me I'd get this Biostar board for $35 as it supports 16GB of DDR 3 and up to an 1100T X6 CPU, add a cheap CPU like Phenom II 3GHz dual core until you can afford to grab an X4 or even better an X6 (the 1035T and 1045T are both great values and can be found in the $100 range) and finally add a cheap 2GB or 4GB stick of DDR 3.

If you used the rest of the guts of your old system for around $100 you would have a new system with PLENTY of upgrade potential down the line. I personally game on an X6 and see no reason in the near future to even think about getting anything else as turbocore gives me a fast triple for single threaded games and of course I have 6 cores when I need to do heavy lifting, its a great chip. And this way you'd have a core system that has plenty of headroom for adding RAM or a faster chip without breaking your wallet.

I don't know...would it be better to get a Q6600 for $70, and still have slower RAM and probably a lower amount, lower speed PCIe, probably SATA 1 if you are lucky, when you can just get a new triple, board, RAM and case for $130 after MIR and you'll have DDR 3, SATA 3, and a board that will go up to a Phenom II X6 later on if you need more speed later?

That said if you have a board already and don't want to risk ebay you can get a quad Q8200 from StarMicro for just $55. I've bought from StarMicro for years, great bunch of guys and great service.

I would say it all comes down to what games you are playing. if you are playing games like TF2 and Batman:AC? Well no problem then, slapping a new GPU will give it a good kick in the pants. if you are trying to play some huge RTS with a ton of units? Then the CPU is gonna be the bottleneck.

That said its often cheap to upgrade your CPU, especially if you have an AMD as they have so many backwards compatible chips and hung onto the AM socket for so long. A good place to look at getting a new CPU would be StarMicro which I've used a LOT in the shop with never any issues, they go from the socket 478 on the Intel side to socket 754 on the AMD side with just a ton of chips to choose from. If you want a gaming machine they have plenty of high clocked Athlon and Phenoms at good prices and if you want a chip to make a killer HTPC out of this low power Phenom X4 makes a pretty kicking HTPC chip and its only $68 bucks.

So its really not that hard to keep a system that is a few years old gaming well, my youngest is gaming great on a 3.3GHz Athlon X3 and that chip was only $65 on sale, and my oldest got a Phenom II X6 for only $100 as part of a kit. While these aren't gonna beat any i7 like my 1035T they are still great for gaming and have no trouble playing all the new games we have run on them.

I would say it all comes down to what games you are playing. if you are playing games like TF2 and Batman:AC? Well no problem then, slapping a new GPU will give it a good kick in the pants. if you are trying to play some huge RTS with a ton of units? Then the CPU is gonna be the bottleneck.

That said its often cheap to upgrade your CPU, especially if you have an AMD as they have so many backwards compatible chips and hung onto the AM socket for so long. A good place to look at getting a new CPU would be StarMicro which I've used a LOT in the shop with never any issues, they go from the socket 478 on the Intel side to socket 754 on the AMD side with just a ton of chips to choose from. If you want a gaming machine they have plenty of high clocked Athlon and Phenoms at good prices and if you want a chip to make a killer HTPC out of this low power Phenom X4 makes a pretty kicking HTPC chip and its only $68 bucks.

So its really not that hard to keep a system that is a few years old gaming well, my youngest is gaming great on a 3.3GHz Athlon X3 and that chip was only $65 on sale, and my oldest got a Phenom II X6 for only $100 as part of a kit. While these aren't gonna beat any i7 like my 1035T they are still great for gaming and have no trouble playing all the new games we have run on them.

A word of advice Billy about Windows and motherboards...know what fucks people more than anything? Northbridge as Windows does NOT like you switching Northbridges and you'll often have to do a full re-install if you switch from say an Nvidia to AMD Northbridge and vice versa.

This is why when I decided to give my AMD Deneb quad board to my youngest i took my time and found a board with a similar Northbridge because sure enough just to see if MSFT had fixed the problem i tried plugging the drive into a new board with an Nvidia Northbridge and nope! I would have had to go full re-install if I switched. But since I was careful about which Northbridge I went with I was able to swap out pretty much every part on the computer, board, CPU, GPU,RAM, even changed out the 500Gb for a 2Tb and only had a single re-activation that took less than 10 seconds online.

So if you don't mind wiping and reinstalling? You can switch anything for anything, never had an activation take more than a couple of minutes by phone, most passed online in seconds, but Windows does NOT like it when you switch NBs on anything newer than XP, and even on XP it'll tend to make the system buggy. But since i stuck with an AMD NB I was able to go from a board that maxed out at a Phenom II quad (oh its SAYS it'll do a hexacore but MSI are lying sacks of shit, it won't even post on anything bigger than a quad) to a board that will take the latest octocores and still keep my RTM Win 7 install.

Oh and I agree with you about how nice it is to do CPU upgrades a word of warning...most of those CPU compatibility lists? LIES. What I have found is nearly all the AM2+ and AM3 boards will max out at Deneb, they will NOT take a Zosma or Thuban or newer, because the boards can't supply the voltages for turbocore. Most of the board manufacturers simply looked at the TDP to decide what would work without actually testing and any chip with turbocore that says 95w is actually required to have closer to 107w when turbocore kicks in and so won't even POST in a board that was built before TC came out, compatibility lists be damned. that means the most your board will support is a Deneb based quad but NOT any higher, just FYI so you don't waste money down the line on a chip that won't fit.

BTW if you want a cheap triple of quad for the box just go to Starmicroas I've been buying from them for years and you can get great deals on just about any socket by Intel and AMD. If you are not gaming the Phenom X3 for $53 is quite nice, built several office boxes with those and they are good chips. They also have the low power AMD Phenom quad for $68, those are great for HTPCs and for really quiet office boxes. Just FYI.

Sorry, my bad, I thought from the tone of the conversation you were going for a low power file server, which those bobcats kick serious ass at.

The Piledriver is a decent chip, I do hope you're looking at the dual socket Opteron for that kind of a load, IIRC they are up to like 16 cores per socket with the G34s, that will give you PLENTY of headroom.

BTW if you ever need a chip to fill out or upgrade a unit you ought to check out Starmicro as i've been buying from these guys for years and you can get some crazy deals on chips from them, it just all depends on what they have in that week.

Yeah no shit, just built a brand new Athlon triple for a customer and guess what was on the driver disc along with Vista and 7? XP drivers.

So if I can buy brand new gear today with XP drivers i doubt finding NOS will be hard after 2014, hell I had a customer that hung onto Win2K until last year simply because he had mission critical software that wouldn't run on XP. Its really not hard to find the hardware if you need it, I can go to someplace like Starmicro and get CPUs going back to the Slot A and Pentium 3, really not hard to build a NOS system these days.

Uhhh...forget about the TLB bug friend? When it came out the Barcelona chips had the TLB bug AMD basically dumped them on the market at crazy cheap prices. I was getting triple core kits for $175 and quads for $199 which mean i could sell them for $399-$450 and make myself a nice profit while giving the customer an insane amount of power. Hell Starmicro sells the Barcelona triples starting at just $53 so it really wasn't hard to make triple and quad systems for cheap. doesn't really matter WHAT Vista specs were BTW, its not like people were selling 1Ghz Vista systems. just FYI but I just didn't sell Vista at all, I either gave them XP32 if it was 3Gb or XP64 if it was 4Gb, had too many bugs when i was testing Vista for my taste.

And if you sold crappy systems? Well that's a shame, don't know what that has to do with what I was selling in MY shop. I keep one or two off lease systems for the poor folks but I don't count those as they are used. When i talk about what I sold on the low end I'm talking about the new systems, not some junker Billy Bob traded in. I can't believe you actually sold something that didn't even meet Vista Basic specs, if anything slower than 2.2GHz came into my shop i stripped any good parts and punt kicked it into the trash. Now on the poor boxes i won't accept less than a 2.8GHz P4, have a 1.7GHz I'm gonna be chunking in the morning as a matter of fact.

And as for gamers keeping 6 to 7 years? What game out now or due out soon is even gonna stress a 1035T, much less a Core i7? All you have to do is swap out the card and you are golden. hell I'm playing on a 4 year old HD4850 and it just chews through new games with lots of bling and never drops below 30FPS on my 1600x900 monitor. in 6 to 8 months the HD6850s will drop below $70 (I have to buy 3 at a time so me and the boys stay on equal footing) and we'll be able to get another 3 years easy peasy. Games have been more GPU than CPU bound for several years now and if the rumors are true about the PS4 specs then the next gen frankly won't be as good as I have now, at least with 2 out of 3 systems.

So I really don't see what your issue is, except maybe you are confusing "gamers" with "Must win teh benches LOL" geeks that use their PC as an ePeen types. Hell it was only last year when my boys Pentium Ds could no longer run the latest games and even then it was only a handful like LA Noire and Just Cause II. We've just about reached as far as its gonna go as far as games friend, we are already looking at companies putting out less graphically intensive games because the huge costs to make a AAA game means they just can't afford to cut too many people out of the market. Hell Crysis 2 only requires an Athlon X2 at 2.2GHz for the love of Pete!

But you are right about Joe average, I finally had to just build my GF a new system and say "Here hon,merry Xmas, now get rid of the dino because i'm tired of fixing it!" because she was still hanging onto a 3GHz P4. Know what my most popular build is for those types? One of the E350 SFF systems. Its quiet, gives them dual cores and hardware accelerated flash, its cheap and solid as a rock. for those that just do basic tasks its a great little system. of course being a geek I built my GF an Athlon X3, I figure if she is gonna hang onto it for years it might as well be a system i enjoy working on LOL!

Meh if you just want to throw a few more cores to some project throw you together a cheapie with an AMD low power from Starmicro. I've been buying from them for years, great guys and if you keep an eye on their site you can get some crazy deals. I was buying AMD Phenom I low power quads for $40 a pop and now they have the X3 unlockables for $48, cheap prices. That way you can just throw the box in the corner and let it do its thing 24/7/365 and not slow down your main machine.

As far as GPUs? The place you want to keep an eye out on is Geeks as their refurb GPUs are often crazy cheap. Again been buying from them for years, no hassles. If you ever have a problem with either site just give them a call and they fix it quick, great guys. With 2 teen boys that also game I have to try to keep us close to parity which triple everything adds up pretty quick. The HD4850s they are selling are dirt cheap, just blow through all the games we throw at 'em and the drivers are solid and mature. We'll run 'em for another year and then I'll get the 6770s or 6850s and make my money back on the 4850s off of CL.

Wow look at how I got modded down by the AMD fanbois LOL! Which is funny as hell since I haven't sold a single Intel unit since I heard about the bribing of the OEMs. But truth is truth and the last three CEOs of AMD has run the company right off a cliff.

I wish I could find the link, it was on one of the ATI gaming forums of all things when I tripped over it, but one of the guys that actually engineered the Athlon64 came on the forum and laid out EXACTLY what went wrong with AMD. The Cyrix guys? GONE. The guys that made the Athlon64? GONE. In fact according to him ALL of the guys that made the chips that made AMD famous? GONE. They were ALL fired and replaced by "computer layouts" which have a 30%+ penalty on both heat and die size and according to him are a hell of a lot more likely to cause you to have bugs like the TLB and Core 2 fails to scale bugs AMD has suffered as of late.

If you got it cheap enough like you did? yeah I can see it, but you shouldn't discount the other Thubans just because they aren't the 1100T. I've been building a ton of 1035T and 1045T and I can tell you the last runs of those chips just had insane amounts of headroom and with some decent DDR 3 you can get crazy OCs on those chips. It was a 1035T that I got the 3.3GHz-3.7GHz Turbo and that was with a cheap Asrock gamer board, if I'd have put a little money into a decent OCing board and a better cooling unit I probably could have gotten close to 4GHz off of that baby. As it was I was barely getting 140F under load with a cheap $30 cooler and some Arctic Silver.

And I've been there friend, you just hate to have to replace a good board like that. A good resource for the next time you get in that boat is Starmicro as they sell chips going back to Slot A and are pretty damned affordable. I've been buying from them for years and it really depends on what they have this week but you can get some insane deals from them.

But I know how you feel friend, I haven't built an Intel system since my Cedar Mill P4 (hey it was cheap and I was able to get 4GHz on air) and have NO desire to see Intel become a monopoly but seriously...what choice do we have? What am I gonna replace my netbook with when I wear it out? I love the hell out of the Brazos chip its got but they killed the successor to Brazos and Bulldozer sucks balls in mobile for power draw and I gotta have at LEAST 5 hours.

And on the desktop what am I gonna build when I run out of socket AM3s? My customers have made it clear than Win 8 is a giant DO NOT WANT and with BD you have to kill half the cores just to keep it from sucking, and last I checked you could get a low end Intel quad for the same price as a BD "8-core" which I'd have to kill 4 cores on and the Intel curbstomps it in both heat AND IPC, so what can we do?

I can tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep selling AM3+ systems for as long as I can, luckily most of my customers don't need "top o' the line" performance and I'm getting the triples, quads, and hexas cheap enough that I can still save them a good $200 off an Intel machine by going AMD. But those stocks are gonna run dry, the boards are gonna go up, then what? All I can do is hope the new chip designer they hired away from Apple will take one look at their roadmap and say "Oh HELL no!" and come up with a competitive chip. Because as it is with each new tick/tock its getting harder and harder to stick with AM3, especially since no new chips are coming out.

Actually you'll probably think its a stupid idea, but I'm seriously thinking about one of the E350 boards like this one or there is this cool site i tripped over ages ago i've been shopping at called Starmicro that sells CPUs REAL cheap and i have a nice little socket AM2 board I got from a customer who had me upgrade hers only to find her CPU was the problem. I'm torn between using that board and one of the higher rated Athlon singles or saying fuck it and using the Pentium D board I also have in the closet since they sell Pentium Ds there for like $12 with $3 to ship so for $15 and a couple of cheap RAM sticks I'd have a nice dual core i could keep or sell.

Looking at the prices I'd probably skip the E350 as you can get a nice Mini-ITX kit with an E350 already in it for like $100 so no point on using one of those when I can just get the kit, but in any case it is such a pretty box I just can't stand the thought of throwing it away. hell its pretty enough that with a decent PCIe card on the board i could see someone using it as an HTPC simply because its pretty enough to have sitting in a living room. And I agree the fold out thing IS cool as hell, in fact the reason i picked it up off the girl on Freecycle (besides the fact she was also giving away a damned nice monitor I could use at the time) was because i wanted to play with PPC and loved the case design.

Sadly the damned thing just won't play nice with my PS/2 KVM, no matter what kind of adapter i use and I'm not giving up my KVM, its like new and has audio ports so i can control 4 systems with audio all of my single LCD so in the closet it sits. I did drag it downstairs to the shop where I had some spare monitors and played with it for a while, even with that being a G3 the Panther OSX installed on it was quite peppy, its just a shame I don't really have a use for it and even with a cheap price on it its never sold as is, so i figure next time i have a break she'll be the case for my next project PC.

Dude, you're doing all that...on an Atom? Doesn't it drag ass? if it were me I'd replace that sucky Atom with a cheap Phenom X4e, those support ECC and can be had for $62. Figure in $30 for an AM2+ board and $20 for a 2Gb RAM stick and for less than $115 you'd have a machine that would be a HELL of a lot faster than an Atom at multitasking.

It runs surprisingly well, I get around 15MB/second write speeds (and over 30MB/second read) which is more than I need for what I use it for. About the only time I notice it being slow is after I've ripped a movie from DVD and am copying it over to the fileserver. Most of the time I access it via Wifi so the disk is faster than the network. It's used only as a headless fileserver, no windowing system is installed so I don't need to worry about interactive performance.

I thought adding the webcams and zoneminder would push it over the edge, but even with doing motion detection on the 3 cams, the CPU hovers around 30% utilization, so I really have no complaints with the performance.

Not too bad for 35 watts of power (including the UPS). The TDP of the Phenom is 95W, and the motherboard is probably not all that power efficient either, so I'd probably at least double my power consumption if I went with a faster CPU. The Atom costs me around $50/year in electricity to run,so if I doubled the power consumption, it'd cost me around $100/year.

Dude, you're doing all that...on an Atom? Doesn't it drag ass? if it were me I'd replace that sucky Atom with a cheap Phenom X4e, those support ECC and can be had for $62. Figure in $30 for an AM2+ board and $20 for a 2Gb RAM stick and for less than $115 you'd have a machine that would be a HELL of a lot faster than an Atom at multitasking.

My board is an AM3 that is about 4 months old and it don't have it either, they didn't start on the desktop until Liano. I haven't had the chance to put one together yet (still scoring good deals on AM3 and AM3+ so I've been using those instead) but from what I understand the FM1s are already using it, as is later E series chips. I have one of the first Brazos E350 and Asus used EFI and NOT UEFI so it has none of the locks like secureboot. Its quite possible some of the OEMs might just go that way instead as the only advantage UEFI over EFI is secureboot which I'm sure will just cause more support calls so I can see many just using EFI.

But according to AMD's press releases they are committed to CoreBoot and all chips going forward will be built with Coreboot. as another said one COULD tie Coreboot into UEFI but from what I've seen its gonna be a very basic EFI that works as a BIOS (So they can support larger HDDs) which quickly hands off to Coreboot which takes care of the rest. what really pisses me off is Asus offers Expressgate with their machines but frankly its become so crippled its not worth messing with if you aren't a 14 year old girl. its pretty much designed around FB and chat now and it doesn't even have Skype anymore, and no easy way to add any apps to it. That is a shame as having an OS that boots in 6 seconds and gives me full Wifi is nice, but without being able to even add support for any video other than Flash it just too crippled to make a difference.

So as long as AMD is going with Coreboot there is nothing wintel can do, not unless they want to risk another antitrust. But you are right that AMD rules, I have been selling AMDs exclusively for 2 years with nothing but happy customers and I eat my own dog food, me and my boys are rocking two hexacores and a quad and they do anything we can think up and are crazy fast. I even sold my full size for a EEE E350 netbook and having a machine that plays 720P for 6 hours on a charge or does basic office work for 7 is damned nice.

If your board supports it might want to look into snatching a Thuban while they are cheap, I went from a 925 to a 1035T and I can tell you that Turbocore kicks ass and take names. If you watch their email fliers Tiger has been selling Thuban for as low as $100 which is damned cheap for a 6 core. I paired mine with a $30 Hyper N520 cooler and it runs around 95f idle and barely reaches 122 under load, just a great chip. Oh and 1 final note, if you don't know about them Starmicro sells chips for all the older sockets cheap, its a great way to max out that older AMD PC.

Really? That's a damned shame because you can, well at least you COULD with AMD enjoy hellish speed boosts by getting one of the lower chips to start with and then moving up as the prices dropped. the box i'm typing on started with a dual core 7550 (which is now in my landlady's PC) then I went up to a Phenom II 925 quad (now in my youngest boy's PC) before finally getting a Thuban X6. With each upgrade I got a hell of a speed boost and since I was able to keep everything else, like the 8gb of DDR 2 800 I got when it was cheap I was able to upgrade the machine for a hell of a lot cheaper than it would cost to buy a new box each time. I saved enough that with this last upgrade i went ahead and bought a crossfire board so simply add a second GPU when mine starts to lag to get even more life between replacements. Personally I bet this X6 will probably last me until the end of the decade unless some breakthrough allows them to code for more than 4 chips easily.

anyway next time before chunking you might want to try Starmicro as they are the go to place for cheap chips. they go all the way back to socket 423 on the Intel side and slot A on the AMD side so there pretty much isn't a desktop out there you can't give a speed boost with a starmicro chip.

Sorry friend but given the choice I'd take AM3 over Liano, AMD really screwed the pooch with those chips. Why? One word...sockets. I'm afraid you are screwed when it comes to the socket friend, AM3+ is getting exactly ONE more chip before they pull the plug, and they have already announced Bulldozer will be an FM2 chip NOT and FM1 and the two sockets aren't backwards compatible.

Frankly Intel couldn't ask for a better competitor as AMD has really been shooting themselves right in the face, no need for Intel to do or say shit. First they kill AM3 which not only had the budget and "bang for the buck" demographics tied up but could have been served by a single chip, just take a single 95w Thuban, any that have bad cores you make a Phenom II X4 or X3, any that have bad cache you make an Athlon X4 or X3 and voila! 100% yields and no waste. Instead they toss it for chips that are 40% more expensive while being nearly that big a difference in performance the WRONG way, with the Thuban and Zosma often stomping the crap out of the A series and BD, and their prices are too close to Intel on both the A series and FX to make them worth buying, its a total clusterfuck.

So honestly friend the E-series is the only current chip from AMD I'd touch right now, hell Tiger has been selling Thuban X6 chips for $99 and it stomps a mudhole in the asses of both the A series and FX while having both cheaper boards and more choices on boards. BTW you want cheap chips, be it Intel or AMD, you ought to check out Starmicro whom I've been buying from for a couple of years. Great service and plenty of choices, their $60 Phenom I X4 e chips make great HTPCs, low power and real transcoding monsters.

Let da feet help you out friend, if you want recent chips look under used on Amazon and if you want older chips, i'm talking going all the waaaay back to socket 754 and earlier then Starmicro is your friend. they have both Intel and AMD and those cheap Phenom I quads i've found make damned good cheap renderboxes or HTPCs and my office customers just love 'em, the E chips only use 65w while letting them multitask like crazy without dragging down the machines, perfect for secretaries,factory floor, or slap it with a Hyper N212 or N520 for a nice quiet HTPC that does transcoding.

That said friend take my advice, Tiger is selling the Thuban 1035t for just $130 for the retail unit. Take that HSF that comes with it, go "whoosh" right over your shoulder, hook that bad boy up with a Hyper N520 and you have a fricking monster! Just for shits and giggles since I have a killer Asrock board that OCs easily (A770DE+, great board if you have plenty of DDR 2 lying around like the 8Gb I had and has CF) and I managed to get her up to around 3.1Ghz and STILL had plenty of headroom before i thought "Why?" and dropped it to default clocks. With turbocore she'll jump up to 3.1GHz anytime I am doing anything that needs 3 cores or less and having 6 cores cranking at 2.6GHz she chews through video transcoding and disgital multitracking, and you know what my idle is? fricking room temp! No shit its room temp and tops out at 108F and that's after 3 hours of Prime95. man you slap that chip with that cooler? its a fricking sweeeeet combo man and you can't beat the price. Snatch one while you can man, snatch one while you can.

Did you mean the 9100e, as in this link: http://www.starmicroinc.net/product/HD9100OBJ4BGD/-AMD-Phenom-X4-9100e-AM2-18GHZ-4MB-3200MHZ-HD9100OBJ4BGD-CPU-OEM/?

I mean this one:http://products.amd.com/pages/DesktopCPUDetail.aspx?id=623
The 910e is a "Deneb" core. At 2.6 GHz, it is not that bad in performance, and the official TDP is half that of most standard AMD quad cores at the time I bought it (65 W vs. 125 W). You may get lucky with a standard chip that happens to be close to the 910e in power consumption, but that is not certain. Also, the new FX processors are a questionable upgrade over the Phenom II ;-)
Note 1)
In the meantime, the 1045T has appeared in shops. With 6 cores, 2.7 GHz and 95W TDP it looks very nice too, and today I'd be tempted to get that one instead of the 910e.
Note 2)
If Intel would support ECC RAM in their desktop chips, I might have bought an Intel Core i5-2400S instead. Same TDP in the specs and superior performance (even if Intel cheats a bit with the TDP, I'd consider the difference an acceptable tradeoff).

Considering the GPU, I wanted to keep things in the max. 70 W range. Not only because of power consumption, but also because of noise (70W can, in my experience, still be handled by a not too noisy air cooler).

Okay I gotta ask.....why? The E series is a horrible chip, loses in every metric and you could have simply underclocked a standard chip and not only would it have been cheaper you would have saved on electricity while having the ability to ramp up if needed. Frankly the only E series i touch is when a customer has a socket AM2 board and they want a cheap upgrade as Starmicro has some E series quads dirt cheap and if the customer just wants a render box or video converter better to have 4 slower cores than 3 faster for that use case. But that is a truly awful chip for gaming, gets awful scores and frankly doesn't save as much power as an underclocked Athlon or Deneb Phenom II.

But if you are truly concerned about your electric bill (one thing I don't have to worry about thank goodness as its thrown in along with water and garbage with my apt) then the Thuban and the Asrock would be the better choice and in fact I'd take the Pepsi challenge against your 910e and i'm confident I'd win, how? Because Asrock has ACC and an OC dashboard that lets me not only OC but to UC and turn off cores at will. my 6 can be anything from a single to a 6 core, and any speed from 1.6Ghz-3.5GHz simply by using ACC. The only place you'd beat me is in the GPU power dept but then again my HD4850 is more powerful by a good 50% while only costing $51 at geeks new.

So I just don't get why you'd have chosen THAT chip of all things, you'll probably start hitting bottlenecks on the CPU pretty quick and the lack of headroom for OCing means there simply won't be any place to go. I just hope you got a steal on the chip because like the first gen Phenoms they really don't fit any niche well, too much power to be considered truly low power but not enough headroom to be considered mainstream. BTW if you need cheap chips for upgrades i've been shopping with the Starmicro guys for years, they are a great bunch and I've never had a bit of trouble with their chips. they were even nice enough to call when the chip I had ordered was sold out and offered me a more expensive chip for the same price and just wanted to make sure it would fit, that's nice. Plus you gotta love a place with $15 Pentium Ds and $20 Athlon Mobiles. You can drop them socket 754 athlon mobiles in just about any socket 754 system and get a REALLY low power nettop out of it, very nice.

Name one, because I'd set up sandisk and Cowon and Rio and just about every kind of MP3 and PMP known to man and I have NEVER actually seen on that preferred NFS, not saying that one couldn't exist but if it does you are talking a teeeny tiny niche of a niche friend. And as for NAS? that's what those cheapo HP WHS boxes are for. Its a HELL of a lot cheaper and unlike some jury rigged homebuilt it will actually be efficient and is actually BUILT for that job, its also great for media and file serving since it has a ...drumroll...server OS!

And XP PRO had it, which has been replaced by Enterprise. Win 7 Pro is for workstations which is what pro originally was back in the days of WinNT and Win2k but MSFT had to get WinXP out the door quick after WinME went down in flames so they didn't bother separating the workstation and enterprise builds like they did with WinNT and Win2K. So complaining about that is like complaining that you built support around a glitch and get pissed when the glitch is removed. look up the versions of NT/2K and you'll see they had Enterprise and Data Center for the jobs you listed and NT/2K pro was for workstation.

In the end it comes down to the fact you simply don't want to pay for the correct version that you require but in a capitalist system they are free to set the price and you are free to use something else. For the jobs you have it would frankly be insane to use a desktop because its not designed to support the connections you require and there is already a perfectly affordable version that is DESIGNED to do the tasks you want. Now if you say that $48 is too damned much for a server OS then we'll know you are just trolling. If not may I suggest you buy a cheap AM2+ board along with this chip along with a cheap case from Geeks and for less than $250 all told you can have your very own low power high performance media server. i've actually built a couple using that chip and Asrock boards and its easy peasy to make a whisper quiet media server using the above.

AMD has usually been good about getting the latest codecs supported so if 10 bit becomes the mainstream i have no doubt it'll be supported. After all with modern GPUs its pretty trivial to flash them to update the chip and with even the lowest chips and APUs having 80 stream processors that should be more than enough horsepower once the latest routine has been coded.

And I looked at the 13 series and frankly I find them to be a bad value as you can buy a black edition quad for less money than an i3 and when you figure in the cost of the board you are talking nearly 60% higher build costs in some cases depending on which chip you go for. Its trivial to underclock the Athlon and Phenom chips and with most boards supporting core unlock even on the low end its quite possible to get a 3.2GHz Athlon X3 that'll unlock to quad for less than $75 shipped. With it unlocked you can drop the volts and have a 2.2Ghz quad for that price and any benchmark will tell you for transcoding more cores beat HT any day of the week. The ONLY places where I've found the i series makes sense is for those trying to win benchmarks and those that are having a lot of work that is heavily single threaded. Hell if you don't mind using an older chip (which since we are talking about an HTPC and not gaming really doesn't matter as transcoding again only cares about cores) you can pick up a CULV Phenom X4 for $55 which you can then slap into either a Shuttle case or one of the many mATX VCR style cases and end up with a nice HTPC for sub $350 if you shop around. I've actually used that chip in both an HTPC and in an office box where they wanted peace and quiet and I can tell you that its pretty easy to cool that chip with a passive Zalman HS or a thin copper HSF.

But for a thin and small HTPC I really doubt you're gonna find anything that will match the bang per buck of the E-350 because you can get a nice board for less than $100 with the E-350 so if you DIY sub $300 HTPCs that do 1080p is easily doable which you just aren't gonna get anywhere near that price point with the i series, hell i doubt you'd be able to hit that price point going with the older Core chips. If we were talking gamer PC then there are some use cases where the lower end i series makes sense, for example some shooters tend to favor single threaded performance above all so in those cases the lower end i series would make sense over Athlon but in HTPCs the i series just uses too many bucks and not enough bang IMHO, better to have more cores and a better GPU. But of course again that is only if you want the box to also transcode, for an HTPC that is gonna be used primarily for streaming and playback an E-350 is the much more affordable route. I've hooked one in a VCR style case to a 55 inch 1080P and the customer couldn't be happier, with a full Win 7 HP he is able to watch anything on the web as well as enjoy his entire media library, all from the comfort of his easy chair. Now the only problem he has is getting his wife off the thing as she loves using her FB from that fat TV screen!

But at $100 for the board plus chip if you have an older machine you'd like to upgrade you really ought to give one a spin. at that price i've been using them for low cost office machines and you really can't beat the bang for the buck. a few months back I upgraded the print shop down the street with all E-350s except for the three units where they are doing heavy graphics work which i built some Phenom IIs with Radeon HD5670s and they couldn't be happier with the performance and the secretaries are just raving about how much nicer it is, and of course the owner was raving about how much lower his electric bill became when they switched because now the average worker is using less than 70w under load and most times using less than 45w and that's including monitor. like I said you ought to give one a try, they are cheap enough that it doesn't hurt your wallet and having a machine so quiet that the only thing you hear is the clicking of your keyboard IS nice.

If he just wants to go cheap and its gonna be stuck in some garage anyway i'd say white trash it like we did at my last shop. Me and the boss took a couple of the biggest cheapo ATX cases we could get our hands on, took out the motherboard mount and cut the frame on one, and finally a couple of small weld stuck them together. We ended up with something like 16 SCSI drives in that sucker for a total of 2Tb when most folks were still getting 80Gb drives. with those babies loaded with every single driver for just about every piece of hardware up to that point it was quick work to reload a PC.

:As for the board I'd go with something like a cheap AMD board with a nice cheap Phenom low power quad. you can get a Phenom I quad for $55 at Starmicro and add a couple of Gb of DDR 2 for maybe $25, board for around $40 and finally a decent HSF for around $15.

So when you figure in the cases which with no PSU can be had for less than $20 a piece from many places like Geeks you are looking at a final total of around $185 for a quad with 2Gb of RAM with an add on card for adding more SATA slots. Sure it won't be the prettiest thing around but if its just gonna be serving files from a corner somewhere who cares? I'd add a little more and get a full size board with lots of SATA slots and 3 PCI slots for adding more SATA cards and you'd have a thing you could load to the brim and with the low power Phenom quad you'll have plenty of power for controlling the whole deal and maybe even it doing some of the transcoding work via scripts at night when its not serving files.

I know they are using the form factor, doesn't change what I said. personally i'd love to have all kinds of cool little cards i could plug into a card reader the way we used to use PCMCIA. Nowadays unless you spend out the wazoo they simply don't include anything other than USB and while USB is great (hell my dad now has 23 USB ports on his PC, he believes EVERYTHING should be USB) it would still be nice to be able to just plug in say a little digital tuner card or other device through the card reader that every unit seems to have now.

And i'm glad you like Ninite, its a Godsend for those that need to load up a new box or laptop as you found out. i hope you don't mind another suggestion, but if you put together a machine more than once or twice a year WSUS Offline is your friend too. With WSUS Offline you can have ALL the Windows updates PLUS Service Packs PLUS .NET PLUS any version of MS Office updates ALL in one easy to use handy dandy tool. it'll make an offline updater out of a thumbstick or DVD, no "install reboot install" mess, you can tell it with a single checkbox to shut down or reboot when its done, just a nice little tool to have. I have everything from XP - Win 7 X64 in mine, just run it once a month to get the latest updates which since it has all previous updates it takes very little time to get it current.

Oh and one other final bit of advice, well two actually. 1.- if you need a cheap CPU upgrade for an older box? Go here as their service is top notch and the chips are some of the cheapest prices around. I can't count the number of machines I've upgraded thanks to Starmicro chips and you can't beat a place that has Pentium Ds for $18 and AMD quads starting at $55. 2.- If you or anybody else here runs into the "No device under sound" problem in windows, even though you KNOW you've installed the driver? Feel free to email me, i have a simple reg file that fixes that problem instantly. It simply resets the Windows sound server back to its default state. simply clicky clicky, reboot and voila! Instant sound. I've had this little reg file for years and I can confirm it works on ANY Windows from Win2K- Win 7 X64. Just put in the subject line "Sound reg file" so i know what its about.

Anyway i'm glad you enjoyed Ninite, its the little handy dandy tools that make life so much easier, and i hope your stepdaughter enjoys her new PC! I'll be using Ninite myself the middle of next week, i'll be building my GF a nice AMD quad for Xmas and she'll be getting the full Ninite treatment. man I can't wait until she sees it, all black and red and silver, it'll be the first new box my baby has had in something like 6 years.

Yeah you can't beat Asrock as i too have bought some of their bottom of the line boards for clients and they just run and run and run. BTW if the computer fairy needs a hand I'd suggest going over here as i've bought many a chip from these guys for builds and their service is top notch, and as you can see they have Phenom X4s starting at $55. By buying a piece here and a piece there you can easily end up with a sub $200 quad, sub $150 if you manage to salvage a few parts off your last build. And believe me its just nice to sit down and hear that baby purr and know there is nothing you can throw at her that will stall her out, I can watch a movies WHILE transcoding a video AND converting an AVI to DVD and never lose a frame, man that feels good. happy holidays!

Mind a suggest? I can tell you how to upgrade her hardware to something nice for around $100. get a nice cheap AMD board (cost at newegg...$29) and then go here and grab a Phenom. 4gb of DDR3 is $20, the CPU HSF another $10 for one that will cool a Phenom, no biggie.

As for PCs dying? i must have like the best luck on the planet then because besides the bit with the stolen cap formula i haven't see a PC dead from caps in ages. hell i have one that is over a decade old still in the field, it was handed down through 3 families until a gal that got it brought it to me and paid $50 to have me drop in a late model P4 with board and 1gb stick.

So honestly there isn't a reason why a PC can't last years and years especially if you DIY where you can buy quality parts. The reason you see these dead dells and HPs is because they skimp on EVERYTHING. They have shitty PSUs, fans, HSF, caps, anything they can screw to save a buck, as long as it'll last 3 minutes past warranty. meanwhile my PC is about to hit the 4 year mark and Santa is bringing me a Thuban (We wish you a merry Thuban and a happy six coreeee!) and from that one chip no less than FOUR people get upgraded, as my chip i have currently goes to my dad for his Phenom I Quad and his Quad goes to my girl as part of a nice new rig to replace her 5 year old box which will be going to her daughter. Oh make that FIVE people as the late model P4 her daughter has which she is switching for her mom's Pentium D will be going to her brother who has been using a late model P3 I had lying around in the shop as a netbox.

So you see? PCs are the gift that keeps on giving, they just get passed from hand to hand like how my boys are gaming on my hand me downs with a cheap HD4850 thrown in. BTW please don't just throw your wife's PC away, wipe it and put it on your local Freecycle. there are plenty of guys like me that refurb older models for folks that don't have one and while DDR 1 might be expensive for all you know somebody there has a box full of the stuff. Oh and if you want some DDR 1 RAM try your local mom and pop shop. We usually have plenty of the older sticks and will often cut you a deal.

"Intel Desktops don't have ECC" FTFY

AMD desktops all support ECC and have for ages. When you figure in the cost of the board and Intel's price for the chip one could easily get get one of the low power Phenom variations and still have money in your pocket. One of the places i like to get chips from (great bunch to shop with BTW) has the AMD Phenom X4 9150e which is a 65w quad at 1.8GHz for $55. Slap it in a nice cheap business class board, I prefer the ECS business class myself, and you have a nice cheap server that will be quiet as a churchmouse while being cheaper and more powerful than the Intel Pentium dual.

Question: How much bandwidth would that run? Because I've never had the chance to set up a cluster (most of my customers are SMBs and SOHOs) so I have no idea how much bandwidth you'd need to feed something like the Amazon cloud. If he is like many of us they probably have bandwidth limits and/or have to share that bandwidth with other users so if it takes a big ass pipe I could see that possibly being a problem.

That said if the cloud was out of the question I'd snatch up plenty of cheap AMD boards along with some cheap triples from Starmicro and simply mount the boards tray style in a simple home made rack. Those triples are last gen but at $40 a pop dirt cheap, any cheap cooler will work on those with an open tray design, and geeks sells AMD boards that they'll lost the I/O shields on for something like $20. Throw in some cheap DDR 3 and some small SATA drives along with Linux and voila! Cheap cluster.

But I have to agree with you and everyone else that if they are that tight on money the cloud would give them the most bang for the buck, and cut out a lot of the hassles and upkeep as well.

Uhhh...it sounds like an F16 taking off?

Anyway let old Hairyfeet set you up and show you how its done. First I'd start with this box, while personally i like a little more elbow room he said little so little it is. Next up for a nice powerful but cheap CPU I'd go with this Phenom triple if he has a tight budget or this Phenom II quad if he has a little more to spare. I have this Phenom II chip in my own system and it is easy to under and over clock, and I have built plenty with the first Phenom triple chip, both are great.

Then you'll have to measure the depth to know how big a HSF you can go for, bigger is of course quieter so if it has enough room (haven't used a shuttle in awhile so I can't remember the depth offhand) I'd use something like this which if you turn on C&Q when you aren't slamming the Deneb this will be pretty quiet. Then for GPU something like this HD6570 which IIRC is the largest AMD makes that will still go low profile and passively cooled.

Finally slap in a 1Tb Samsung EcoDrive (quiet as a church mouse) and 4Gb of RAM along with Win 7 HP X64 (or the OS of your choice) and voila! You are good to go friend! Enjoy!

I could make it a hell of a lot more powerful and silent cooling BTW, but that would increase size. You can't beat the laws of physics, if it is powerful it is either gonna need fans or a big ass heatsink to cool the sucker. I've found most liquid cooling to be just as noisy if not more than regular HSFs, it just moves the fans from the CPU to the radiator. But this should give you a nice combination of speed and quiet and when you aren't slamming the living hell out of the Deneb all you will hear is the quiet hum of the PSU, that's it. With mine I hear the AC on the far side of the room more than I do the PC not 3 feet away from me, its nice.

Oh but you could OC the living shit out of the Celery back then! With a good air cooler and a little luck a Celery could be OCed by a good 30% to 35%. Man in those days there really was a reason to replace your gear every 3 years or even less, the innovations on both sides of the aisle were just like two heavyweights duking it out....then Intel bribed all the OEMs and won through deceit what they couldn't when fairly, boo hiss.

Meh the big story as far as AMD goes isn't gonna be BD, frankly IMNSHO as a PC builder frankly PCs have been "good enough" on the CPU side for quite awhile which is one of the reasons my customers are quite happy I put my money where my mouth is and became an all AMD shop. No the really BIG STORY in 50 foot neon letters is gonna be the switch from VLIW to Vector Based GPUs, both in the discrete and in the APUs.

Imagine a chip that can not only crank out graphics like nobody's business but can actually work like a hyper FP on top of that with VERY little penalty. Today you are lucky if you get 1/4th the performance on double FP but with the new chips that will be cut down to less than half for the first bunch with the goal of native speed double FP in the next gen. I bet the math geeks are drooling at that prospect right now. And for those that switch to the APUs it'll mean an all new hybrid Crossfire where the APU can take over physics while handing off rendering to the discrete for some truly insane graphics. Sounds pretty damned sweet to me.

I just hope more geeks here at /. do as I do and give AMD some business. Unless you are one of those that literally slam your CPUs right to the bleeding edge (which admittedly there are more of those type here than on average) frankly the bang for the buck has been firmly in the AMD camp for some time now. you can get better quality boards with damned good IGPs for cheaper, The huge length of support time on the AM socket means you can go from dual to quad to six core without replacing anything but the CPU, the quads are dirt cheap right now, they just make really damned good, solid as a rock, long lasting systems.

I mean how can you not love a company that lets you get a fully loaded Black Edition dual kit for $200, a triple core kit for just $250 which BTW kicks ass as an HTPC, just swap the case for one of the "VCR style" cases and a dirt cheap 4xxx or 5xxx GPU, or a quad for $270? Oh and for those that have older machines I'd suggest a trip over to Starmicro where you can pick up cheap chips to upgrade older machines, both Intel and AMD. In my shop the Phenom X3 and the Pentium Ds are both quite popular upgrade paths for those with older AM2s or LGA775s respectively. Enjoy and go AMD!

Actually I'd say the REAL reason to upgrade would be that you can get a hell of a speed boost cheap which in this dead economy cheap will ALWAYS win!

For example my current PC started with the Athlon X2 7550. Not a bad CPU, I still have it in a drawer and one of these days I'll build a cheap box around it for one of my family. But for a little while last year they had the Phenom II X4 925 for just $110. That is double the cores, quadruple the cache, a hell of a speed boost all around. Now where else am I gonna be able to shave nearly half the time of my video transcoding without having to shitcan and start over?

I already have a TB of HDD space, 8Gb of RAM, I don't want to have to throw all that over my shoulder to gain a speed boost. AMD gives me that instead of playing socket bingo (BTW the TFA is wrong, there are currently FOUR sockets being sold as they forgot Intel still makes and sells chips for the LGA775 platform as well) and if I run across one of those X6 95 watt rare as hens teeth CPUs I'll be snatching that bad boy up!

But I don't see the problem with TFA. There is NO way to keep backwards compatibility with a CPU that has its own GPU because that requires interconnects that currently simply don't exist. You can still drop AM2+ chips into an AM3+ Motherboard IIRC, and it isn't like there isn't a wealth of chips to choose from for the current AM2+/AM3 platform, from the wimpy (but easy to unlock cores from what I've heard, so great for HTPCs) Sargas Semprons all the way up to the 6 Core Thuban huge bastards. I know I've been selling the current quads and all I've been hearing is how happy my customers are with them. It still amazes them coming off late P4s how they can burn a DVD while watching a video AND IMing and have NOTHING skip or glitch, it all "just works" and Windows 7 works beautifully with splitting up the loads.

I just wish the 95w AM3 6 core wasn't as rare as hens teeth. I've got a really nice business class board and don't want to give it up, but like most business class tops out at 95w. The compatibility chart lists three different AM3 95w 6 cores that are compatible, but actually finding one is damned near impossible. Oh well, that is what makes PCs right now such an incredible deal, as my quads will easily last me years with no need for anything but the occasional GPU upgrade (which since my GF got me an HD4850 for my BDay it'll be awhile before I need one of those IMHO) so I can wait until some place like StarMicro (highly recommend BTW, great place to lengthen the life of a machine for cheap. I got a pair of Pentium Ds for just $30 a piece!) gets the OEMs.

So thanks AMD for making the socket last as long as it did, if you can make AM3+ last as long as AM2/AM2+/AM3 I'd be grateful. Oh and can you PLEASE crank out more of the 95w Thuban 6 cores and get them to places like Newegg? Thanks.

I just thought I'd let you know FYI if that socket 775 will support it you can get Pentium Ds for dirt cheap $28 and as you can see they have chips for just about ANY older PC you may have, and have some crazy deals on AM2 if you would like to upgrade to a triple. I mean how can you turn down a triple for $42?

I have bought plenty from these guys, the last a pair of Pentiums Ds to upgrade my nephews for Xmas, and they have top notch service. They even called me just to make sure I hadn't hit the order button twice because I bought two of the same chip. So if your board will take it you really can't beat a $28 CPU upgrade since as you pointed out most games don't even slam a duallie yet. BTW those Pentium Ds are CRAZY OCers, talking to guys online 3.6Ghz-3.8GHz is easily doable with good air cooling. all my nephews play are MMOs so frankly the dual by itself is overkill. But if I was you I'd snatch a cheap duallie to drop into that 775 if it will take it (I've found most will take the 805 D if nothing else) because at $28 the performance boost would be incredibly cheap. They also have X4s but the sweet spot from them on the AMD side has got to be the $42 8650. Anyway I just thought you might want to see some cheapie upgrade options, happy hunting!

I just thought I'd let you know FYI if that socket 775 will support it you can get Pentium Ds for dirt cheap $28 and as you can see they have chips for just about ANY older PC you may have, and have some crazy deals on AM2 if you would like to upgrade to a triple. I mean how can you turn down a triple for $42?

I have bought plenty from these guys, the last a pair of Pentiums Ds to upgrade my nephews for Xmas, and they have top notch service. They even called me just to make sure I hadn't hit the order button twice because I bought two of the same chip. So if your board will take it you really can't beat a $28 CPU upgrade since as you pointed out most games don't even slam a duallie yet. BTW those Pentium Ds are CRAZY OCers, talking to guys online 3.6Ghz-3.8GHz is easily doable with good air cooling. all my nephews play are MMOs so frankly the dual by itself is overkill. But if I was you I'd snatch a cheap duallie to drop into that 775 if it will take it (I've found most will take the 805 D if nothing else) because at $28 the performance boost would be incredibly cheap. They also have X4s but the sweet spot from them on the AMD side has got to be the $42 8650. Anyway I just thought you might want to see some cheapie upgrade options, happy hunting!

Have you tried unlocking any cores yet? That is the one thing I haven't tried I'm really debating. The trouble is while the 7550 dual I have in the drawer is no doubt a 4 core with two switched off, the only boards I see with selective unlocking at cheap prices is the Nvidia 6050 based boards which is a shitty GPU. On the other hand the AMD based boards have a nice HD4200, which for my GF whose idea of "gaming" is Farmville style flash games along with the occasional CSI game, having flash accelerated would be nice. Of course having a triple or quad to hand her instead of a dual would be nice too...ARGH!

Talk about a PITA, but it is about time I got my GF off the P4 she has been running and a nice custom built box would make a perfect early BDay gift. I guess I'll just end up flipping a quarter and picking whichever wins the toss. As long as it is a dual core with a couple of GB of RAM and XP she'll be a happy camper anyway, and I have that 7550 and an XP Pro license just sitting here unused. But I'd love to hear if you had any luck trying unlock and how much of a PITA it is, because if it is easy sailing I suppose I could always pick up a cheapo Radeon card for her, or maybe even pick up that 4850 I spotted cheap and give her my HD4650.

But I agree that anybody buying duals, especially Intel ones, are just nuts with triple and quads so cheap. If I didn't have the 7550 already sitting there I wouldn't even think of less than a triple, and the only reason I picked up the Pentium Ds is that my kids PCs are old 775 boards that won't take bigger and at $30 each they were a dirt cheap upgrade. Hey if you've got any older boards you'd like to upgrade cheap let me recommend these guys. Fast service, cheap prices, they were even nice enough to call me after the order just to make sure I hadn't pushed a wrong button because I ordered two of the same chip. Really nice folks and the chips were perfect. With prices that low I'll probably max out the CPUs on all my older machines while I can, my family don't slam PCs hard so they'll last them for years anyway.