Sandy bridge for a HTPC build?

Hi, i am currently in the process of ugrading my pentium 4 pc into a dual core or quad core setup for my htpc gaming rig.

am i better off waiting for sandy bridge? is all sandy bridge cpu's quad core and triple channel ddr3(i want to move my current 3gb ddr3 ram to this htpc and buy 6gb or 12gb sticks for my main i7 rig).

All i need for a htpc build is mobo, ram, cpu, PSU. the rest i will re-use. im wondering what sandy bridge actually offers? can anybody describe ina nutshell what is so special about sandy bridge? faster? less wattage? cheaper?

Wait for sandy bridge, older stuff will get cheaper.

SB, is cooler, faster, but not cheaper at the moment.

are they dual and quad cores? Or pure quads only?

Sandy Bridge CPUs are a mixture of dual, quad, and even hex-core CPUs. Only the high-end socket 2011 Sandy Bridge based CPUs will support triple channel. That's due out in Q3 2011. The Sandy Bridge CPUs being released on January 5th or so are the mainstream socket 1155 CPUs with support for only dual channel.

For the HTPC market, probably not much besides lower power usage as far as advantages goes for the Sandy Bridge CPUs.

The dual core 35W i3-2100T looks interesting, but won't have many performance advantages over the i3 540 besides future AVX coded apps and something that uses the dedicated video encoder (if it's a SB-wide feature). Load power will of course be lower, but typical & idle power probably won't be much lower.

I have a mini ITX HTPC/TV gaming system using an i3 540 and GT 240 and it uses surprisingly little power for typical tasks. I can't imagine SB uses significantly less power, maybe a couple of watts less under a similar load. The graphics are improved, but I would still want a discrete video card if I get a SB board and CPU in the future.

Sandy Bridge integrated graphics will be able to handle HD video and web content just fine. Gaming, not really unless you're talking several years old.

i got a 260gtx card collecting dust

If you're using it for just an HTPC, leave out the 260, you won't need it which is a nice bonus to SB.

If you are using it for gaming, again the 260 isn't great because it's not really fast enough to drive games at 1920x1080 and it doesn't have HDMI out. Plus it's loud and power hungry (at least my 280 was), so overall a poor choice for an HTPC.

a 260 is fine for any number of games at 1920x1080.. it won't run them at max settings but turn off antialiasing and scale back the settings a bit and it's fine especially if you own it and it's sitting around. You'll need a DVI to HDMI adaptor, purchased for cheap at monoprice.com.

I would wait the 4 days and get sandy bridge personally. There's simply no reason to buy the old generation stuff at this point if you don't already have it. If you do, there's no reason to upgrade to sandy. This upgrade is more for socket 775 and older people.

Because of performance.....this CPU is the ultimate HTPC gaming cpu to have. Slap this together with a 6970 and you will shred just about any pc gaming title at 1080p resolution.

The games i will play mainly will be racing sims and football games. all fps games like crysis 2 will be played on my main pc which has a 480gtx and a i7 920

From the looks of things, for HTPC, it's probably better to go with AMD's Fusion.

CHANG3D said:

From the looks of things, for HTPC, it's probably better to go with AMD's Fusion.

Click to expand...

It really depends. If Llano's GPU is around HD 5550 performance (trade-offs: HD 5550 has 80 fewer SPs, but 2x more memory bandwidth which is dedicated) and if that is good enough for the the more demanding uses (light gaming), then yes Fusion would be a better choice just due to the GPU. It might not be as power efficient as the i3 2100, but the bump in GPU performance may be a worthwhile tradeoff.

HD 5550 performance is of course faster than any IGP right now, but it is still pretty slow. The GT 220 is faster for example and that's a slow card for gaming. So if someone required a faster GPU in a HTPC, then it goes back to CPU performance and a PCI-E video card. Unfortunately for the Llano Fusion processors, they are still based on K10.5, and are basically Athlon II X2/X4 CPUs with an integrated GPU. The low end i3 2100 crushes those processors in gaming and non-gaming performance (using a PCI-E video card).

Without any gaming requirements, the 35W version of the i3 2100 looks hard to beat on new generation processors this year. There are still plenty of useful older processors of course. I'm happy with a recent i5 661 upgrade in my miniITX HTPC (using GT 240 for video).

is quick sync only available inn h67 boards?

It only works if video is outputted from the on die GPU at the moment. So it is limited to h67, but also you have to use the on die.

Although there was a software solution from Lucid demoed at CES I believe to get around this limitation (allowing a discrete card to be used in h67), I'm not sure if it is available yet or what the performance impact would be.