OK - it's 'recommend me a mobo/CPU for less than £125" time...

[trjp]

Following on from my SSD/HDD woes thread(s) - the owner of that PC was going to upgrade from his AMD250 to a 965 Black Series - but as we've deduced his (nForce based) motherboard will cripple his SSD performance (or stutter like a mofo) the idea of getting a whole new CPU/Mobo is on the table.

The upgrade cost on the 965 was low - £75ish all done - but it would be like putting a 420ci into a Punto (with a broken exhaust) :)

A mobo upgrade will mean new memory (8Gb of DDR2 in this board) and we only have £150 max - so taking off £30 for the memory leave £120 for a cpu and mobo - just about doable??

I could certainly get an AM3 board for the 965 but there may be better options?

The alternatives is he's just going to live with his PC as-is - no point spending £75 on a CPU for a board which cripples everything else...

[Sakkura]

You can be a good friend and lend him £8.77, can't you?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-3220 3.3GHz Dual-Core Processor (£89.48 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-E33 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard (£42.90 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Patriot Viper 3 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£26.39 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Total: £158.77
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2012-12-03 16:32 GMT+0000)

[trjp]

Interesting choice - benchmarks on-par with the 965 (or an A8-5500 I'd been looking at) but only 2(HT?) cores where those chips have 4 actual cores?

I do wonder if 'real world' use on the i3 would be a bit slower - but then his demands aren't complex - he'd hardly notice I reckon.

Upgrade potential is there too I guess (not an ideal board for an i5 perhaps but when they're cheap enough!?)

I'd love to get under the budget tho - need to shop around a bit perhaps... thx!

[Sakkura]

The Core i3-3220 has two blazing-fast cores (plus two virtual cores, but hyperthreading is a bit meh). The Phenom II 965 has four fairly slow cores, though you can at least overclock them (but to do that properly means getting a more expensive motherboard).

In games, the Core i3 will tend to be faster. For threaded workloads, say, compressing a bunch of files with 7-zip, the 965 will be faster.

[trjp]

I'm thinking of my workloads where I often run into snags due to only having 2 cores - a browser can easily use 2 cores these days - something like Eclipse seems able to consume ENORMOUS CPU resources too (that's Java - I know) but I also spend a fair bit of time running the Android Emulator which is resolutely single-threaded and so needs the fastest possible cores you can get (it runs better on my old P4 3.4 than it does on this AMD 245, for example!) :)