[herds]

Was about to get a trinity system then spotted the new Richland APU are out.

From what I gather they' slighty better on the CPU side, a lot better on the GPU side and better with power consumption.

Was thinking of this one:

AMD APU A8 6500 Quad Core.

--
also, 4GB enough for a dedicated xbmc/plex machine?

[Dougie Fresh]

Richland is basically Trinity clocked a little higher and priced a little higher. I'd buy whatever's on sale and matches you needs. Even A6-3500/A75M-ITX is still a very good HTPC platform.

[cwide]

Really depends what you want out of your machine. XBMC/Plex machine doesn't say very much.

Plex client or server? Transcoding?

What files are you playing in XBMC? Audio setup?

Gaming? Emulators?

[herds]

plex server to probably 1 or maybe 2 ipads, not used a lot.

xbmc - mkv, a mix of 720p and 1080p bluray rips outputting dd or dts.

gaming - a few fun type games as well as snes, megadrive, mame emulation.

[cwide]

Dougie Fresh's recommendation of the A6-3500 is a good one.

Depending on your games you would also probably be fine with a Celeron G1610. Those emulators don't need much GPU and the CPU is more powerful than the A6-3500. For 2D media playback, the GPU isn't going to matter very much.

You can also get HD audio in Openelec (Linux) with Intel. AMD needs Windows.

So, depending on your budget, I would pick between the A6 and Celeron and just buy whatever setup is cheaper.