cpu/mobo advice

[Jammor]

not sure if this question belongs here or in mobos...

I need to add a pc to the house. I'm a father of 4 and two of the kids want to to do low level gaming (minecraft, roblox, etc) and don't want to do it on a laptop. I'm going to clean up and give them the Q9550 / Radeon HD 4600 /Asus p55QC / 8GB win8.1 I built in 2008 and then build a new one for me.

I need advice on what to get. I already have an empty case, unused psu & optical drive. Most of what I do is family finances, email, surfing but occasionally I do home video editing and ripping dvds w/ makemkv and handbrake. When I do the video editing of family vids (mpeg2 mostly) I need raw encode/decode processing power.

I'd like to stay with 4 cores but I *think* an i7 is overkill and think a 3rd or 4th gen i5 might work well. I don't need/want to overclock so don't need unlocked multipliers or overclockable mobo (I don't think...). This PC will run 24/7 and power consumption and heat are important but not ruling. I'm not a fanboy of Intel or AMD but from what I've read seems like Intel is the safer bet for the trade off in power consumption/heat vs processing power.

• Is my assumption about an i5 a good one and what's a good value i5?
• What's a basic no frills mobo for i5 (socket 1150?) I've built with asus, msi, intel, gigabyte, & asrock and don't have a preference
• Is the onboard video (HD 4xxx or 5xxx) in the latest intel CPUs powerful enough for editing / rendering home mpeg2 vids?

Thx

 

[TechyGeek]

Handbrake supports quicksync, please look at that tech - it comes in i3 i5 and i7. No frills i5 around 200 will do just fine, you can use 3rd or 4th gen both will be fine. Look at ASUS mb - they are stable, and good value. $150-200 for cpu i5, preferrably 4th gen z97 or h97 mb

For around 600 you can get i5, mb, 16 gb ram. Use intel quicksync on handbrake to gain 10x speedup in video encoding.

not sure if this question belongs here or in mobos...

I need to add a pc to the house. I'm a father of 4 and two of the kids want to to do low level gaming (minecraft, roblox, etc) and don't want to do it on a laptop. I'm going to clean up and give them the Q9550 / Radeon HD 4600 /Asus p55QC / 8GB win8.1 I built in 2008 and then build a new one for me.

I need advice on what to get. I already have an empty case, unused psu & optical drive. Most of what I do is family finances, email, surfing but occasionally I do home video editing and ripping dvds w/ makemkv and handbrake. When I do the video editing of family vids (mpeg2 mostly) I need raw encode/decode processing power.

I'd like to stay with 4 cores but I *think* an i7 is overkill and think a 3rd or 4th gen i5 might work well. I don't need/want to overclock so don't need unlocked multipliers or overclockable mobo (I don't think...). This PC will run 24/7 and power consumption and heat are important but not ruling. I'm not a fanboy of Intel or AMD but from what I've read seems like Intel is the safer bet for the trade off in power consumption/heat vs processing power.

• Is my assumption about an i5 a good one and what's a good value i5?
• What's a basic no frills mobo for i5 (socket 1150?) I've built with asus, msi, intel, gigabyte, & asrock and don't have a preference
• Is the onboard video (HD 4xxx or 5xxx) in the latest intel CPUs powerful enough for editing / rendering home mpeg2 vids?

Thx

 

[Ken g6]

Is my assumption about an i5 a good one and what's a good value i5?

Yeah, when video work is rare, i5 makes sense. Onboard video should be fine.

Use intel quicksync on handbrake to gain 10x speedup in video encoding.

I wouldn't do this for video to be archived, though - the quality is somewhat inferior. :\

The next question is: New or used i5? New I'd go for an i5-4440 and an H81 mobo (or B85 if you want 4 RAM slots). Used I'd look for a locked (no "K") i5 3000-series (for less power use), and a (new) B75 mobo. I don't have much of a brand preference either here - those brands you listed are good and BioStar isn't as bad as it used to be. Just look for the ports you need for your monitor and anything else like USB 3.0.

I'm a father of 4 and two of the kids want to to do low level gaming (minecraft, roblox, etc) and don't want to do it on a laptop. I'm going to clean up and give them the Q9550 / Radeon HD 4600 /Asus p55QC / 8GB win8.1 I built in 2008 and then build a new one for me.

Off-topic: I strongly suggest you upgrade the video card for them, at least a little.

 

[Yuriman]

If you're not picky about the quality of CPU encoding vs quicksync, and i3 would otherwise be plenty for your needs. All Haswell CPUs will have very good idle characteristics, but you may not be able to use your current power supply with one.

I'm a huge fan of mini-ITX builds right now. It bothers me that midtowers tend to be mostly empty.

EDIT: How about a Haswell NUC?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-055-_-Product

 

[bonehead123]

No frills i5 around 200 will do just fine, you can use 3rd or 4th gen both will be fine. Look at ASUS mb - they are stable, and good value. $150-200 for cpu i5, preferrably 4th gen z97 or h97 mb

For around 600 you can get i5, mb, 16 gb ram.

^^this^^

You can save some $$ by buying this stuff used...either from the marketplace here or over @(H)ard, TPU, or O/C.net...

I just built a pretty fast mItx rig using an i5-4670K 4G Haswell/Z87 mb/R270x/8GB for just over $650, but I had to buy a case & PSU too ($120 together)

just sayin.....YMMV though....

 

[Jammor]

Thank you all for your advice.

In looking at the Haswells, it looks like there was a 4th gen released and then a 'refresh' of the line up? Can anyone save me the research time and summarize what happened with this 4.5 generation of CPUs? Or am I misunderstanding what happened?

 

[Yuriman]

Devil's Canyon are the 4690K and 4790K. They have a slightly improved interface between the core and heatspreader, and thus run a little cooler. They are higher clocked than their replacements.

I think there's also one instruction set added that was previously missing from the "K" chips. Something to do with virtualization?

 

[Jammor]

The B85 mb's look like they are sufficient for my needs. I'm interested in the i5 4590 but don't want buy a mb that requires a bios flash in order to take the 4590. I think the 4590 is a 'refresh' cpu...

 

[Yuriman]

The B85 mb's look like they are sufficient for my needs. I'm interested in the i5 4590 but don't want buy a mb that requires a bios flash in order to take the 4590. I think the 4590 is a 'refresh' cpu...

I purchased an MSI B85M from Newegg recently, and a Haswell refresh CPU booted fine. H97 boards are often close to the same price as B85 though, so you might choose to go with one of those instead if the price difference isn't large.