Help choosing upgrade from Pentium G630

[yottabit]

I thought this would be a simple process but I'm a bit confused about what I should do now

I'm trying to upgrade my HTPC which has a Pentium G630 & HD 7770 and an Intel motherboard that can only support 65 W CPUs (Here's the list of compatible processors http://processormatch.intel.com/CompDB/SearchResult.aspx?BoardName=DH67CF)

I have another system that's got an i5-3570k and a Radeon 7770 and I'm very happy with that one's performance. But now I'm starting to do a little video encoding on the HTPC and it's horrible.

I don't want to spend more than ~$200, and that's why I'm confused what the best value is. I thought I could snag a cheap IVB i3/i5 at Fry's but guess I waited too long they are all gone now.

I can either spend $130 for a IVB Core i3 like the 3220:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-i3-3220-.../dp/B0093H8HXS

Or ~$200 for a low wattage (S/T) version of an IVB quad:
http://www.amazon.com/Intel-i5-3470S.../dp/B0087EVHN0

It doesn't seem worth it to spend $130 for a dual core, but I'm just not sure how much of a performance hit the 3470S would have compared to the 3570k in the other system (it's actually at stock clocks) It's hard to justify spending $200 on an upgrade for last-gen, but then, is there really any advantage to Haswell in my case? Quicksync is one of the main reasons I'm upgrading, but that should work fine with IVB or Haswell

I started thinking about getting something like the AMD FX-8120 and a cheap motherboard, which would probably be <$200. Even though it seems to have a lot of raw power it doesn't have quicksync and I'm worried I'd miss out on other (light gaming) performance
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103961

Or is there any performance improvement or features that would justify getting an LGA 1150 motherboard and Haswell quad like the i5-4570?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819116896


I guess my biggest question is do you think the ~3470S is worth it or will the performance difference from the 3570K be very noticeable? It seems hard to find benchmarks on the S CPUs. Also one concern is the HD2500 graphics, but from an old Anand review he seemed to state that having less EUs doesn't usually affect Quicksync performance. Do you think that's true?

Does anyone do CPU/Mobo combos anymore? Newegg doesn't seem to have any except for Gigabyte

Also is there any next-gen stuff coming out I should possibly wait a couple months for?

Thanks everyone!

 

[yottabit]

Well after doing some research I'm hearing that the Haswell Quicksync can be quite a bit faster (although with slightly less quality) I'm worried that the HD2500 in the IVB quad will underperform in the future once more programs are optimized for Quicksync.

This is pushing me to towards getting a new motherboard and CPU. I could get an i5 4570 and a basic motherboard for about ~$250. Let me know if you think I'm on the wrong track

 

[Revolution 11]

Whatever you decide on, don't get a Haswell i3 without checking the drawbacks first. Early impressions show lots of power usage, not much faster than Ivy i3 CPUs, and high price. There's a big black hole between the Pentium and i5 product lines.

More information at:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2340362

 

[yottabit]

Went with a new i5-4570 and a cheap Asrock motherboard (believe it or not I've had pretty good luck with them)

Reasons for this:
Although Anand didn't have much on it I found some benchmarks showing a pretty big gap between HD2500 and HD4000 quicksync performance here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/display/intel-hd-graphics-4000-2500_7.html

On top of this the HD4600 is a little bit faster than the HD4000 at transcode with similar quality settings
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-4770k_10.html

So I would guess the HD4600 is probably 50-100% faster than the HD2500 for transcode

 

[escrow4]

Quicksync gives you rubbish quality either way, much better to rely on software and CPU cores. Ideally could have gone for a 6300 and 970 board.

 

[yottabit]

Quicksync gives you rubbish quality either way, much better to rely on software and CPU cores. Ideally could have gone for a 6300 and 970 board.

:/ For what I'm doing, which is going to be mostly uploading to Youtube and condensing home videos, I'm pretty happy with Quick Sync quality and the fact that it's SO much faster. The Haswell incarnation of it gives some more options for high quality too.

That being said I don't think an FX-6300 performs better than an i5-4570 for encoding (at stock clocks at least, Anandtech Bench shows an i5-3470 ahead by ~10%), I think I would've had to get one of the 8 core AMD like the FX-8120, definitely getting one of those and overclocking it would have given me much more raw processing power, but where most of what I do is going to be relatively low quality stuff I just can't give up Quick Sync.

 

[yottabit]

Quick update with some preliminary tests (installed the i5-4570 this morning)

Test rendered a 3:30 second clip recorded off my HD Camcorder in 1080p

Output res was 1280x720 30fps, 16 Mbps using Sony AVC codec in Sony Movie Studio Platinum 12

CPU-only rendering:
Time to render: 2 min 34 s
Resulting file size: 351 MB

Quick Sync (speed) rendering:
Time to render: 1 min 4 s
Resulting file size: 410 MB

The file size is a little bigger with Quick Sync but there's no discernible difference I can see in quality at these quality levels. One annoying thing is I did have to switch my HDMI over to the IGP off my Radeon to get Quick Sync to work.

My trial version of Movie Studio literally just expired. I ideally wanted to run more tests before decided which movie editing software to buy. It didn't seem to have a lot of options for Quick Sync and I couldn't get Quick Sync (quality) to work.