X2 3600 (939) Enough?

Solar

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 16, 2005
Messages
228
So I'm looking to build a media center for the home and I already had a 939 motherboard and DDR memory laying around. Go over to newegg and purchase an X2 3600 for socket 939, $50 Shipped. I didn't even know they made the 3600 for the 939. It looks like is has 256k of L2 cache per core. Will I notice the fact that I'm working with only 256k per core? What type of performance penalty (if any) am I looking at?
 
Hope you're joking.
You dont even need a decent processor to really run a media center box.
Heck, I built a few budget Sempron 3000+ systems to run Vista MCE for friends, and they're still running perfectly with no problems.

Mind you, single core cpu, and two gigs of ram, and a big hd will do you just fine.
 
Actually it depends on what video card you'll be pairing it with and what type of video you'll be playing. There are instances where even a X2 3600+ would be borderline, or even not enough without an overclock (h.264, 1080P, etc). Standard definition, and standard high definition would run fine on it though (720P, 1080i). The amount of cache won't affect it much in this case, it's the raw clockspeed i'm referring to.

Maybe have a mod move this thread over to our htpc forum, or start up a new thread there.
 
If you have no hardware acceleration from a graphics card, some 1080p material you run across *might* struggle a little. But everything else will be fine. If you go with a good media center style graphics card (Nvidia 8500/8600 or ATI HD series) you'll be more than fine.
 
Thats what I'm thinking as far as graphics power. Well 7300 or 8400 actually. I'm leaning more towards nvidia, becasue ATI's driver packages piss me off. I built a computer for my mom with a HD2600. I tried to download the drivers and other than the download install manager, nothing installed. I had to use the CD drivers. I have an ATI Theater550 in my computer and the only thing that installs is the download manager, no matter how many times I download the installer. Back on track, we're not ready to make the full jump to HD yet, so anything more powerful would be overkill. I was thinking about the HTPC forum and figured more people would know about raw processor power here more than anything (256k per core was what was irking me). If I wait for nvidia's 9 series to drop in a few months gfx prices in this segment will probably drop even more.

Thanks for the responses all.
 
I've had the opposite experience regarding ATI and Nvidia drivers, but to each their own.

I've got an AMD X2 4200 and an ATI X300 in my media center. It plays back 1080p video without a hitch.
 
Like others have said, it depends on what you're going to do with it, but that setup should be fine more almost anything. I originally had a P4 3.0GHz with a GF4 video card and it was not enough to play 1080p or even 720p very well. My new media box is an X2 3600+ OCed to 2.6GHz and a 1900XTX and has no problems with 1080p videos from quicktime.com
 
I received the processor yesterday, I never knew UPS delivered on national holidays. For those playing the home game here are the processors characteristics:

ADA 3600 DAA4BV
CDBFE 0712 WPMW

So yeah for those still wondering, it checks out as a 3600 Manchester core with 512k L2 cache. I'm currently putting the memory through its paces with memtest86. Now that I've done some more reading on card architecture, the 85/8600 seems like a better HD recommendation.
 
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