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Help me save my money. Athlon II X4 620 vs Phenom II x2 BE560

Beer4Me

Beer4Me

Senior member
Sooo as many of you are aware, MC has had a promo going on for AMD proc's w/ a FREE mobo.

My current HTPC setup is as follows:
Athlon II x4 620 "Propus" 2.6 GHz quad-core (stock)
4 GB Corsair DDR3-1600
Asus M4A785TD-M EVO
1 TB Samsung F3 HDD

I am considering the following upgrade:
Phenom II x2 BE 560 3.3 GHz dual-core
keep the rest

Sell the Athlon x4 620 w/ the free MC board on Craigslist to recoup some of the cost.

Obviously I would try to unlock the other 2 cores using ACC on my board, but I wouldn't intend on overclocking since it's my HTPC NOT for games.

Is this a worthwhile upgrade? Obviously this is a no brainer if I can get the 2 cores to unlock, but I'm NOT taking that into consideration here.
Do not suggest Intel either. Don't want to switch platforms for convenience sake, plus my primary desktop is already a Q9300 set-up.
Money not being the issue here, more so time I suppose. What say you?

EDIT: I am considering this, because the Athlon 620 seems to be showing it's age in Win 7 x64. My Intel Q9300 desktop is a much snappier machine in Windows. I believe the lack of 6 MB L3 cache has something to do with this.
 
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If I'm following the reports correctly updating to a Phenom II X4 955 about $140 (seen occasionally for less) is the proper upgrade.
Read a comparasion the other day, the 955 was a contender against the Sandy Bridge I3 2100. The 820 is $95 and the 840 $110.
The 560 made a strong showing in a couple single core aps but its dated. OTOH no reason not to have fun.
Your swing..
 
What are you doing that you feel it is showing its age? I am running Vista on my HTPC with a 620 and its been awesome. Although this isn't regular usage, I once was transcoding a video, recording another video, while watching another video (all with 2gb of RAM and one of those 'green' slow hard drives) no problem.

Even though the 560 should have faster ST performance, for things like transcoding the 620 is going to be faster. Also, I have heard (never tried, so ymmv) that the Athlon's overclock pretty well. You might want to try doing that if you have a good motherboard.
 
Try overclocking, they really do have a lot of headroom. My 640 does 3.6 on stock voltage, I assume yours would do 3.2 on stock or a slight bump in vcore. It's worth a shot as it won't damage the cpu.
 
I don't know about OP but to me going from a 4 core to a 2 core processor looks more like a downgrade to me. Although the performance of the PII X2 560 is almost similar to the AII X4 620 with the Athlon II better in some tests and the Phenom II better in certain tests.

They are almost the same and I'd rather go for a Phenom II X4 955 like infoiltrator mentioned. Only then would you feel a substantial performance gain. Personally I wouldn't even consider going from a 4 core to a 2 core due to the fact that I do use VM and I can allocate more cores to the Guest OS.
 
Unless you have very cache sensitive apps, not much point in upgrading to the X2 560 BE.
Edit : Hey, which part of Texas are you in? I saw somone selling an X2 560 BE (or maybe 555) on CL for ~$50 earlier this week.
 
Really, don't want to o/c as this machine is hooked up to a UPS and never sleeps or turns off. 24x7x365. Cool n Quiet is also enabled. It's possible that all of the power saving features that I've enabled in the BIOS could be hampering my system's performance, but low power is what I'm aiming for.

Getting a x2 560 BE (for nearly free) w/ the possibility of unlocking the extra 2 cores is very enticing.

EDIT: So far you all are doing a very convincing job of saving my time! Keep the feedback coming! 🙂
 
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I'd say get a x6 maybe a serious upgrade. but honestly, so close to bulldozer, I'd say save your cash. when BD comes, maybe you'll have more choices opening. an x4 should be sufficient for you for now. since you already got a q9xxx just use that.
 
I wouldn't do that upgrade, it's just not worth the time and money involved. Your current CPU should be more than sufficient for an HTPC.

If it's not performing well, you might want to dig a bit more into what's slow and why...or reinstall Windows if that's the faster option.
 
Getting a 60GB SSD as your system drive would bring about more speed gain compared to swapping out for a new motherboard and processor.
 
deimos3428 said:
I wouldn't do that upgrade, it's just not worth the time and money involved. Your current CPU should be more than sufficient for an HTPC.

If it's not performing well, you might want to dig a bit more into what's slow and why...or reinstall Windows if that's the faster option.
Click to expand...

This. Going from an L3-less quad to a L3-with dual-core isn't that much of an upgrade. I would only do that if you were gaming, as gaming really depends on cache a lot.

Other things like transcoding, not really so much.

I would save your money. Maybe towards an i3 2100 / H61 combo at MC ($100).
 
Thanks everyone. :awe:
I'll skip this upgrade (or downgrade) depending on how you see it.
Guess I'll tinker around with my htpc somemore. Maybe invest in SSD. It's a fresh install of Win 7 btw.
 
dma0991 said:
Getting a 60GB SSD as your system drive would bring about more speed gain compared to swapping out for a new motherboard and processor.
Click to expand...

Yep. I hesitated to suggest this only because OP was talking about an HTPC and HTPCs usually need a lot of storage, and some people don't like organizing multiple drives. If OP doesn't mind, SSD will probably be a huge step up.

VirtualLarry said:
This. Going from an L3-less quad to a L3-with dual-core isn't that much of an upgrade. I would only do that if you were gaming, as gaming really depends on cache a lot.

Other things like transcoding, not really so much.

I would save your money. Maybe towards an i3 2100 / H61 combo at MC ($100).
Click to expand...

Wow the i3 really embarrasses the 620 there... Intel's lower SKUs are like poster-children for the importance of singlethread performance...
 
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Use the CPU site above to compare performance, depending on aps it might work for you.
The point of the I3 2 Core Hyperthreading is you are on the lowest step at $125, and on a board where $200 +- $30 puts you near state of the art goodness.
Past the 955 chip cost/performance benefits decrease rapidly unless using multicore(more is better) dependent aps
 
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Beer4me is right, OCing on an HTPC is not a good idea. And the 620 is plenty adequate. Save pennies for an SB i3 or SB i5 upgrade. in a year or so the miniITX boards should be solid. Maybe sooner. SB was MADE for HTPCs.
 
I wouldn't do it. I have the 630 running at 3.5 ghz with barely any voltage increase and it rocks. It's my main PC and I don't notice any sort of slow down.

If you want a much peppier computer you should use a small SSD for a boot drive. That would go much further than any CPU upgrade.
 
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