What Should I E (E5200 to a i3 2100)

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-rev...

Sandy Bridge surpassed the previous Intel CPUs by a good margin. It may not look a lot on paper but it's still a good deal. You can expect better performace with each generation of Intel CPUs. Some games are more CPU intensive and upgrading will help you out a bit. I also think the e5200 is a bottleneck for your HD 6850. You should make the upgrade. The best budget gaming upgrade to Sandy Bridge is indeed the i3 2100 along with a H61 or H67 motherboard. You can purchase all those for around $200 on newegg. A bit cheaper in Microcenter [like $100 for the CPU instead of $125 in newegg]

Thank you. I found a good combination of an H61 board for 60$, 32$ for 4GB of G.Skill memory, and then the i3 2100. It seems like a solid buy and if you're right about the bottleneck it should help out even more than I originally thought. Not to change the question too much, but do you think it's worth waiting for the extra 60$ to get the i5 2300 or 2400? Would the upgrade to a quad really make that big a difference?

The Core 2 Duo and i3 both are dual cores. How can the i3 give you better performance?

@008Rohit

More efficiency core. Get comparison here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/x86-core-performance...

@ Pyree

Thanks for the link. The i3 is a newer 32nm chip and has better clock for clock performance than wolfdale.  

you can overclock your e5200 and save up for a i5 later on, the e5200 should overclock well and should relive some of the the bottleneck on the 6850

@megadelayed

I do not overclock due to my motherboard and the fact I am using stock HSF. And since it'd cost me a solid 50$ to get a proper motherboard for OC'ing it, I'd rather just put that money towards the new build.

I am thinking I will postpone until I can afford the i5 2400 instead of the i3 2100. I checked out the benchmarks comparing the two and while it's not monumental differences, it will allow stuff optimized for four cores to run better and just seems the most cost efficient choice. And before people tell me to get the i5 2500k, I am interested in saving the money for a second 6850 soon rather than overclocking the CPU. I game more than anything and I'd have to spend an extra 40$ at least for a decent P67 or Z68 motherboard, plus the extra 30 toward the 2500k... I'd rather put it towards graphics. But seriously, thank you all for your input. You've given me good information on this.

The i5 2400 is a great choice. It shows its power and beats i3 2100 in multithreaded games.  
Get a H67 MoBo with it.

I would get an i3 cheapest sandy bridge.

true, and theres no point in getting the 2300 as its only a tiny price difference
@008Rohit
wouldn't a h61 do for a i5 2400, the op could save even more money as most people dont need the more advanced feature of h67

He can get a H61 if he doesn't need :

1. USB 3
2. SATA 6.0 GB/s ports
3. Quick Sync. (Helps in Video Transcoding using the inbuilt HD Graphics)
4. Graphics card overclocking support.

i think quite a few h61 motherboards have usb3, usb 3 is not native for the 6 series chipset so its really up to the manufacturer to add the feature in
the h61 still supports quick sync as long as the igp supports it
but its the other 2 the op has to consider though

^^

AFAIK, H61 doesn't support Quick Sync.

i have a i3 2100 with a biostar h61 itx and i could use the quick sync feature, not sure if its just my model but there is one other thing it doesn't support though: AHCI , even though i have both AHCI/ide mode in my bios, it would not boot with AHCI mode, only with ide

Strange...
My PC used to boot in AHCI mode.

do you have the h61 as well
AHCI isnt really affect performance but it does mean that for the ssd users(me) there is no trim support

Not to nitpick, but QuickSync is supported by H61. Also, GPU overclocking has nothing to do with the mobo, you're thinking of CPU OCing. But that doesn't matter, since neither the i3-2100 or the i5-2400 can be overclocked to anything worthwhile anyway  

I do agree however that H61 is a tad barren. But if he doesn't need USB3 or Sata3 (really the only reason to get H67 over H61) then a simpler board would be fine.

@ striker

Intel's website tells that H61 doesn't support Quick Sync and H67 supports it and Graphics Overclocking. Probably the inbuilt graphics.

Yeah idk. But this posts indicates there's some form of misinformation? http://communities.intel.com/message/124583
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=H61M-VS&cat... <says it supports quicksync.....

i thibj that the h61 DOES support qiuck sync as long as the cpu supports it eg:core i series cos it defiantly works on mine but there is no igp overclocking as only the h67 or the manufacturer allows it

actually, with the ASRock H61M/U3S3 (US$75) it has USB3/SATA3, so all you are missing really is RAID, SLI/Crossfire, and having 4 RAM slots.

yeah but for the price of that motherboard you can get a h67 one for about the same price like this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168... only $75 so its not worth getting the h61 that you mentioned (no offence) but if the op wants to save money then a cheaper h61 with just the standard features would be great for the op

I'd agree with Sqrl on this one. At $75, you get a board with USB3 and Sata3. That's a pretty good deal. Besides, what are the REAL differences between H67 and H61? Never did figure it out haha.

striker: H67 can do RAID 0/1/10. and some boards have 4 ram slots.

thats about it

true but i would probably get a h67 if its the same price as a h61 with more features tho