Okay, I tend to get long winded on questions since I'm AR and thorough so I'll try to keep it short.
I recently got an ASUS P8H77-I ITX mobo and Prodigy case to give my aging Phenom II HTPC an upgrade. The mobo will support darn near every Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPU. I'll also run an 128gb SSD boot and WD Green 1tb HDD for storage with BluRay optical til I get some better HDDs in RAID.
The question...
What CPU should I get? I need not worry about K series since I will NEVER OC it, but I guess what the real situation is, can I get by with just a Pentium or should I go i3 or higher? I'll need the onboard video (to begin with) so HD Graphics need to be considered, and down the road I'll get a GPU and turn on Lucid.
Mainly it will do 1080p video watching, Plex server and YouTube for Roku and store some files in a pseudo-NAS/Samba server for the house (pics and such). I really don't want overkill, but also don't want it choking out on me. And with the onboard video consideration, I'm kinda scratching my head (my old mobo had Radeon HD3000 series onboard so I never worried about it as it did fine for decoding).
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I recently got an ASUS P8H77-I ITX mobo and Prodigy case to give my aging Phenom II HTPC an upgrade. The mobo will support darn near every Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPU. I'll also run an 128gb SSD boot and WD Green 1tb HDD for storage with BluRay optical til I get some better HDDs in RAID.
The question...
What CPU should I get? I need not worry about K series since I will NEVER OC it, but I guess what the real situation is, can I get by with just a Pentium or should I go i3 or higher? I'll need the onboard video (to begin with) so HD Graphics need to be considered, and down the road I'll get a GPU and turn on Lucid.
Mainly it will do 1080p video watching, Plex server and YouTube for Roku and store some files in a pseudo-NAS/Samba server for the house (pics and such). I really don't want overkill, but also don't want it choking out on me. And with the onboard video consideration, I'm kinda scratching my head (my old mobo had Radeon HD3000 series onboard so I never worried about it as it did fine for decoding).
Any thoughts would be appreciated.