Intel Core i5 2500K 3.3GHz LGA 1155 OEM Processor $139.99 + Shipping

Quote from superuser1 : Innocent bystander here, but while you're ITT I do have a question for you if you have the time. I was hunting around for components for a general-purpose home server--something for things like torrents (with automatic extraction), ftp, light media streaming, and a game server for my friends and I--and I came across benchmarks like this [hardware.info] and this [hardware.info]. Normally, I'd lean toward Intel as they seem to own pretty much every price range for general purpose computing nowadays (I use a 3770k in my desktop), but after seeing those benches it looks like the FX-6100 might be worth putting in a home server at the Microcenter price of $100 (includes motherboard). However, it's out of stock in my area, and Microcenter's rep said that it'll be about a week before it's back in stock. In your opinion, would I do well to cancel my order and wait for another 2500k deal? If the motherboard combo applies, I should be able to snag it for $170ish total with gas for the trip included, which is pretty attractive, but I'm not sure if it's worth it over the $110ish FX-6100 setup. Which do you think I should go with, and do you have any potential "better" alternatives for this use case? (Another option I was considering was swapping my 3770k into the server and replacing it with a 3570k in my desktop, although that might be overspending unless an excellent deal crops up. The 3570k seems like it has crept back up in price. I'm really just looking for something that does the job at a good price, which is why I went with the FX-6100 originally--along with the fact that it seems more "future proof", if there's such a thing, with the two extra cores... but if I could get a massive performance boost for a $40 or $50 increase, I'd much rather do that.) Advice is much appreciated. I'm kicking myself for not considering this yesterday when the 2500k was in stock. I woke up today to find the "unavailable" e-mail instead of the normal "your order is ready" from Microcenter.

Looks like a pair of benchmarks that perform the rarely seen usage of the full 8 cores.

Doesn't look like stuff that would apply to your home server needs, as very little of what you described is heavily compute bound. Frankly in your situation I'd buy one of the G series pentium/celeron's with the same two sandy bridge cores that the i5 has, just lower clock, no hyper threading, etc. Toss an $80 7770 card in it. It'll do everything you mentioned, and be a nice little gaming rig. I've bought entire G series machines from the lenovo outlet for $199 with great regularity. Last one I got came with 6gb ram, a 1tb drive, but needed a $15 antec high current gamer 400w power supply before I could put a decent GPU in it. Base unit included can run a 6450 class gpu, but anything north of that and you're swapping power suppplies. Windows license, warranty, etc.

I also see slower SB i5's in the $120-130 range about once a month. One of those would do. But ~$50 or less for the G series cpu is pretty damn hard to beat. The 2500k has the hd3000, which is obviously better than the base HD graphics in the G series, and better than the lower spec, lower clocked versions in the non-K SB i5's.

The FX 6 series looks great when you're running benchmarks that use all the cores. Windows really doesn't do that great of a job at filling more than 4, and most apps don't thread that finely. About the only thing that really makes the FX series look sweet is benchmarks, folding type stuff that threads out to 8 cores, and virtualization. Most people, including me, don't do that stuff.

The problem is that AMD decided to save some money and thus the FX architecture uses two integer execution units per "package", but they aren't full cores in the sense of how Intel makes them. So you won't see the type of performance, core by core, clock by clock, as you will with the Intel cpu's. Funny because Intel did that sort of funny business for a little while early in their multiple core products, and AMD used to roast them for it.

But like I keep saying, everything has its price. A six core for under $100 and an 8 core for a little over would sell, and its not a bad cpu, but unless you run benchmarks 24x7, want it for a beefy virtualization rig, or you're performing compute bound tasks like folding all day long...its not a good value.

Believe me, when I built my last right I really wanted an 8 core just for the fun of it. But the pricing and the general purpose performance just wasn't there. Still isn't.