Best cheap VGA card

Depends on what you want to do with the video card.

If plan on gaming, then i3 + a 6450 512MB is a nice combo. If you get the money for a 6670 down the road, then it will be even better. If you come across a Pentium Dual G840, then get it; it's cheaper than the i3 and performs on par in games.

If you want something cheaper, then the A8 3870K with no discrete is better. You'll be better in games than the i3+6450, but it will lack a little in CPU performance (just a little). Plus, most A8 mother boards come with a PCIe, so you can add another video card (like the 6670) and do a hybrid crossfire with it. Also, for HTPC duty (video playback and quality), the A8 is king as a standalone APU (CPU+GPU in one).

It all depends on what you plan to do down the road and what you want the video card for.

Cheers!

A8 3870K is the best for you.

The 6550D included should outperform all the card that you showed me (except itself of course  )

GPU memory on the graphics card is faster than the one that uses the system memory (the on-chip GPUs) but not on this case, because the 6550D itself is faster than the GPUs that you showed me.

There's so many things wrong with what you said right there. The 6550D will outperform the 6450 and i3 is better than the A8 definitely in CPU intensive tasks. Also, all motherboards come with PCIe. Find a normal mATX or ATX mobo that doesn't have one.

I said it was a nice combo, just because he can upgrade down the road to a better video card and keep a pretty decent CPU while doing so. Since the A8 doesn't do hybrid crossfire with something more powerful than a 6670, he might be better off with the i3 (hence the Pentium Dual G840 comment) if he plans on upgrading the PC he is building down the road.

It's all about what he plans on doing down the road. I'm not going to recommend something without thinking about the long run.

Cheers!

It kind of doesn't make sense though, sacrificing performance now for upgradability. Later, they'll have better hardware and 16nm CPU's from Intel in 2 years. No point in upgrading a old rig as the parts will be overpriced and won't give as much performance as the newer ones.

The A8-3870K is the best option from your choices, but there are better options. An Intel LGA 1155 Pentium plus a Radeon 6670 would cost about the same as the A8-3870K and would outperform it greatly in games. You could get an H61 motherboard or H67 in the same price ranges as the Llano motherboards. you can also use cheaper memory on the Intel system without worrying about a performance hit.

The 6450 is about twice as fast as the 5450 which is as fast or faster than the i3's IGP. The A6 is almost twice as fast as the 6450 and the A8 is a little faster than the A6.

The Radeon 6670 beats all of them with the Sandy Bridge Pentium CPUs.

Intel Pentium G620 Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz $69.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1333MHz 1.5v 9-9-9-24 dual channel kit $36.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

ASRock H61M-VS LGA 1155 Intel H61 $54.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

SAPPHIRE 100326DDR3L Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit DDR3 $64.99 after mail-in rebate + $4.99 shipping
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

Just needs a case, PSU, peripherals, and monitor and it's good to go for $231.95. Also provides an upgrade path to Intel's Ivy Bridge and new video cards down the road.

that's right, it's a sad reality that whenever you buy a new rig, you should try to get the best performance within your budget otherwise future's upgrades become difficult due to the lack of parts or pricing...

i got the corei3 2100 when it initially came out and the performance was (and still is) incredible...a couple of months after that i received the corei5 2500K as a gift and i couldn't be happier, so i got with a mid/top range gaming rig in a blink...coming back with your inquiries regarding the CPU, i would go for the corei3

According to benchmarks done here at Tom's the Sandy Bridge Pentium is almost as good as an i3 even though it's much cheaper. Besides, this rig probably won't get a video card fast enough to show a performance difference between a Pentium and an i3.

The Pentium will be fast enough for years to come in low end gaming, if it stops being enough then you can upgrade to a used i5 later on and save money from buying an i3 now while getting better performance in the long run without losing performance in the short term.

You would need a pretty fast video card to show a difference between the Pentiums and the i3s and that will be pretty expensive for a low end machine unless you got a used, older model high end card.

Yes, I agree with you there. It seems like a dumb sacrifice at first since the A8 is the "overall" winner between the 2 (i3+6450 vs A8), but read what blazorthon says.

It's up to what the OP plans to do down the road.

Cheers!

Actually that's true...if the GPU is not good enough, then chances are that it'll bottleneck the whole rig, i forgot that the real thing is to achieve the best cheap/performance option

I was deceit that the AMD was faster due to the fact that it's quad core and due to passmark benchmarks that AMD was much higher that core i3 and g620.

After a more thorough survey and all of your comments it seems that i3 is faster in most applications (not in my favorite compression utility though 7Zip).

So I will favor i3 if using it's internal gpu has a decent performance in fifa 2012 and Need for Speed Shift 2 in 1280x1024 or even 1024x768. Shift2 requirements are DirectX® 9.0c Compatible 3D-accelerated 512 MB video card with Shader Model 3.0 or higher (NVidia GeForce 8 Series or higher, ATI HD3 Series or higher). Does the i3 gpu meets these requirements?

I am very curious if I Can find virtualization performance statistics for the two CPUs. Theoretically amd would be better since it's quad core.

I configured the following PC:
Intel Core I3 2100 3,1GHz 106EUR
ASUS P8H67-M-PRO 92EUR
GEIL 16GB DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 CL9 76EUR
Barracuda 7200.14 ST2000DM001 - 2 TΒ 129


What is your opinion?

Does anyone knows the difference of the following 4 motherboards ( all are rev. B3):
ASUS P8H67-M LE
ASUS P8H67
ASUS P8H67-V
ASUS P8H67-M PRO

If I3 GPU does not meet the minimum requirements of fifa 2012 and shift 2 i am planning to buy HD6450 1 GB DDR3 for 37EUR. Is it better than GeForce 210?

Will the ASUS P8H67-M-PRO support the ivy bridge processors when they will be available? Another thought is to get G620 and upgrade to an IVY bridge a year later.

yes, 6450 is way better than geforce 210

You can't use the integrated GPUs of any Intel processor in modern gaming, it will not handle it even at minimum settings with the newer games. If you want to play games then no integrated graphics is good enough and I don't recommend anything weaker than the Radeon 6670.

All Intel LGA 1155 boards support Ivy bridge processors if they get a BIOS update that allows it. The Radeon 6450 is not a good gaming GPU, it's only about twice as fast as Intel's HD 3000 integrated graphics, not enough for gaming.

Why do you have 16GB of RAM here? You should have 8GB instead, 16 won't you at all and will cost more anyway.

The i3 is not a quad core, it's a dual core like the Pentium. It has Hyper-Threading so it has four threads, but two logical threads and two physical threads isn't the same as four physical threads. The i5s are quad cores.

If virtual work is what you want then you might be more interested in a faster quad core CPU like an i5-2300, 2310, 2320, 2400, or 2500.

I prefer to get 16gb of memory instead of a better cpu because what i need is multiple VMs and not that each VM will run processes. The cost to go from 8gb to 16gb are just 38 euro ($50).

Each time only one VM will have high CPU usage due to usage by me and not of services or background processes. Tha't why I believe it will have no difference for me between I3 2100 and I5 2300 (always in my budget).

I prefer to get 16gb of memory instead of a better cpu because what i need is multiple VMs and not that each VM will run processes. The cost to go from 8gb to 16gb are just 38 euro ($50).

Each time only one VM will have high CPU usage due to usage by me and not of services or background processes. Tha't why I believe it will have no difference for me between I3 2100 and I5 2300 (always in my budget).

I prefer to get 16gb of memory instead of a better cpu because what i need is multiple VMs and not that each VM will run processes. The cost to go from 8gb to 16gb are just 38 euro ($50).

Each time only one VM will have high CPU usage due to usage by me and not of services or background processes. Tha't why I believe it will have no difference for me between I3 2100 and I5 2300 (always in my budget).

There will be a difference. The i5s can multitask better, especially with high-CPU usage VMs. The i5 has 4 physical cores, lets say they have a performance of 1. The virtual threads of an i3 have about 30% of a physical cores performance at best, so they are .3.

The i3 then has performance total of 2.6 and the i5 has 4, that's a big difference.

Yes, with virtual machines it does make sense to have 16GB, not a problem there. I also have a machine I run multiple virtual machines on and it has 16GB of RAM. Any less and it would be almost unusable, go for 16.