...because I have already built it
decided to update my HTPC, was going to wait till the new year but thought I would save a tenner or so on vat, ordered this little lot a few days ago:
Intel Core i5 650 3.20GHz (Clarkdale).
Asus P7H55-MUSB3 Intel H55 (Socket 1156) DDR3 microATX Motherboard.
OCZ Vertex 2E 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive.
G.Skill RipJaw 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C7 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit.
A bit of overkill for a HTPC but only had to pay about 1/2 as the rest was a Christmas pressie, went for the 650 over a 760 because I wanted to use the on chip graphics, could have gone for a i3 chip but have read in a couple of places that the 650’s are higher binned examples of i3’s to allow the extra overhead needed for the turbo function.
I wasn’t planning to OC this system but this board is kind of epic for a cheap sub 100 quid M-ATX board and has a very long and extensive set of OC’ing options, this is using the stock cooler:
Bugger me! I remember when the 32m test took over an hour! lol
Things were getting a bit on the hot side but still stable at 4.4GHZ, I have a quite old PSU in my HTPC which is only 400 watts IIRC and my 12v line was taking a hammering, at 4.5GHz it dropped to 11.55 underload so I guess that is most likely stopping me going higher.
The memory score is bugged it scores me 5.9 no matter what speed I use, this is the settings I used to get 5.9, should be 7.4 at least with these settings:
Really impressed with the speed, over around 3.8GHz it feels to scale better than my Wolfdale in my gaming computer which seems to hit a bottleneck at around that mark and while benchmarks could tell the difference I struggled to notice it in day to day use. Think I had better get a new cooler and PSU for it though!
