[THRobinson]

Upgrading my sister's system for her, and about to order the CPU (Q6600) and wondering about grabbing another one for $17 for the HTPC in the family room. Also a Dell like hers, checked the CPU support list and should work. I recently switched it from Win7 to OpenElec so starts faster and using fewer resources (I assume). Seems to run pretty good, but a touch laggy when scrolling through the video file lists.

Is it worth the $17 for an upgrade? or, not really?

Dell 745 desktop, 2GB ram, a Dual Core E6600 and a cheap fanless Radeon 5450 1GB video card.

Not sure if extra cores really matter much for video playback.

[teeedubb]

Better to spend that money on a gpu that isnt made by amd - their drivers are horrendous. Video cards do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to decoding video.

[THRobinson]

Thanks...

I recently downgraded my GPU in my HTPC, was using my old card (GTX650Ti) with dual fans, new case looks nice but very noisy. Downgraded to a GT 710 2GB card because fanless and seems to run great. It's also running a Q9450 CPU and 4GB ram though compared to the living room system's E6600 and 2GB.

Spec wise though, the GPU's seem to be about the same overall.

DELL Desktop, pretty much limited to half-height cards and has a small PSU. A few better cards fit that bill... but definitely worth more than $17.