ASUS M3A78-EM and AM3 Combo

[rimmi2002]

I am planning on building a HTPC. I have built two using the ASUS M3A78-EM mobo with 5050e and kuma processor in the past.

This time I am going with the asus mobo and AMD Athlon II X2 Regor 3.0GHzc chip. Figured its a good balance of power consumption and processing power.

Many reviews on the the newegg site mention ASUS mobo is AM3 compatible after bios update. My question is that if I buy this combo, can I boot up with the AM3 chip to update the bios or will I need a second chip to boot up the system and update and then put in the AM3 chip.

Also any big advantage of running 1066 memory. Its more expensive. I was thinking of just buying DDR2800

Any help would be appreciated thanks.

 

[rimmi2002]

any help?

 

[o1die]

The Regor is overkill for an htpc, and it's not very energy efficient. I'm waiting for the 605e quad core which uses only 45 watts. That will be a great chip for htpc systems, and should be out in sept-oct time frame.

 

[rimmi2002]

I am planning to build mine now. I got the chip for $69 at newegg. Can't beat the performance gain at only $10 more than the 5050e. The 605e will also be priced higher. This one is comparable to most intel chips since they are almost all 65W and 45nm technology.

 

[Qbah]

No idea about youor chip, but a Phenom II X4 810 worked out of the box in a friend's HTPC with that motherboard. And it's an AM3 CPU.

 

[rimmi2002]

a quad core has little application in HTPC, unless you plan to do a lot of encoding/decoding. most of the decoding is offloaded to the graphics card. Thanks for the the heads up. If the phenom works then this should too. Will get the bios update for the mobo to recognize it if needed.