AMD Trinity or Intel Ivy Bridge

[kc10boom]

I was thinking of doing a CPU upgrade and was considering the Intel i3 with 4000HD graphics or AMD Trinity quad-core APUs with ATI. Does anyone have any experience with these CPUs? I think both would suffice, though I've been away from the AMD scene for several years since my last AMD CPU purchase 5 years ago.

[olyteddy]

I built with an i3-3225 and am quite pleased. I have reviewed it here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819116774 and here's a short video showing some of its HTPC PQ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STCKwxzL3VM

[erkotz]

Disclaimer: I'm a bit of an Intel fanboy.

Personally, I'd go the Intel route. As far as I know, Intel destroys AMD in performance per watt. Also AMD's chipsets have traditionally been lacking (you get to pick between Via, ATI and NVidia? I'd pick neither, thank you very much).

[Jonny561201]

I guess I get to play devils advocate on this one. I actually decided to try out the new AMD Trinity APUs and I have been pleasantly surprised so far. It has been very responsive and performance has been fairly strong, but please keep in mind that I only really use my media center as a dedicated box so this was never going to be a huge challenge.

AMD chips and boards are still fairly cheap if you are looking to save a little money and upgrade other parts. I will say that TMT performance has been a little sketchy, but they only recently added Trinity support and there is definitely room for improvement.

[kc10boom]

I may be in an upgrade just to upgrade mode with all the November deals on NewEgg. My current system is a 4 year old AMD X2 6000+ (3.1GHz dual core) with an Asus M2A-VM motherboard. I did put an Intel SSD in and a 1GB GT430. Everything is working fine though I use a stand alone Panasonic blu-ray player. I can only process two shows at a time with ShowAnalyzer and they take around 20-25 minutes each, but by the time I get home from work everything is done.

I don't watch 3D movies that often, but I doubt that the CPU/video card will have any issues with a 3D movie (of course I don't have a blu-ray drive to put in it)

[foxwood]

I may be in an upgrade just to upgrade mode with all the November deals on NewEgg.

And I thought it was just me

[kc10boom]

It is really hard not to buy a good motherboard when they offer 8GB of memory for free

I haven't seen any specials like that this month, but I'm going to hold off for Black Friday and Cyber Monday to see what deals come down.