A4-3400 APU (CPU) + MSI A55 FM1 Motherboard + 8GB RAM - $74.99 AR
 

MSI FM1 AMD A55 Motherboard and AMD A4-Series A4-3400 APU and Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1333C9 XMS3 4GB DDR3 RAM and Corsair CMX4GX3M1A1333C9 XMS3 4GB DDR3 RAM Bundle


A4-3400 CPU
MSI FM1 A55 board
8 GB RAM

$74.99 AR


http://www.tigerdirect.com/applic...5&CatId=14

Pretty slick deal!

wish it was mini-itx. i'd have bit.

Good deal. Why can't these damn deals come with HDMI for a HTPC? Been waiting to build.

:x because the ones with HDMI don't need sales to sell! :hug:

A G210 G Card under $15 after MIR can be found on sale oftenly. Add that to this combo and it will make a good HTPC combo.
Do a quick search here or create an alert.

DVI to hdmi adapter work on this baby?

If this was an A75 board it'd be a done deal for me.

How does this processor compare with Core2duo E6600?

Beating E6600 up at all. E6600 is totally crap. Even Intel Dual Core E5200 is better than it.

Thanks baonguyen312!

I see that the MB is only SATA II only. No SATA III?

I was thinking the exact same thing

Quote from mnagesw :
How does this processor compare with Core2duo E6600?

The E6600 is NOT a Core2Duo, its a Pentium Dual-Core.

Wrong! Even the E6600 is faster than this A4. The A4 is the very low-end of the A-series lineup. According to passmark, the E6600 scores a 1902, while the A4-3400 only scores 1629.

The main advantage to the A-series is the integrated GPU. The integrated GPU performs on about the same level as the sandy-bridge graphics.



I'm going to have to pass on this one. That's alot of money up front...I'm sure the rebates will come, but considering that a Sandy Bridge G550 celeron is around $35 (retail, with fan), the ram is worth around $20 (after rebate).

Assuming we see a decent deal on a socket 1155 motherboard soon, the G550 is definitely the way to go. These sandy bridge celerons are actually quite impressive. Every older generation celeron was crap, but the sandy's hold their own.

At ~$35 retail, the G550 scores in at an impressive 2353


EDIT: Looks like only microcenter has the G550 @ $35. Tigerdirect and Newegg list it at $47.99 and $59.99 respectively

Man.. too bad FM1 is not really upgradable.. I heard FM2 is not backward compatible..

Agreed...this is a very cheap price but also a very weak CPU. I had a laptop with the mobile version of this processor and returned it...even for basic word processing and a sub $300 price it was a drag. And no, I don't hate AMD. I've always built my desktops with their processors.

However, passmark is not always accurate but it can give a rough idea.

I definitely agree that the G550 is the way to go. $35 cpu + $50 mb + $20 ram = $105 plus tax at Microcenter. No need for graphics card or rebates. The built in graphics is plenty for HTPC and helps conserve power.

I posted it but I'm hesitant whether to get it or not as well... lol

Nope...totally different configurations. You can go all the way up to A8 3870k. This is the top processor for FM1.

The A8 3870K scores 3634 on passmark.

The A4 3400 scores 1629....

So technically, you could upgrade this to be a little more than twice as fast as the A4.

Not too shabby but not too slick either:
Processor's been selling for $20 these last few days.
RAM is worth $20.
MB is $35 or even less
http://slickdeals.net/f/5675396-M...OS-34-99AR

You can overclock the crap out of these (I think this version of the A4 will overclock) My buddy has one running ice cold @ 4.7 GHZ. While windows experience index is irrelevant, you can easily push this close to a 7

I have a similar setup. Makes a good fileserver. Just throw CentOS on it, plug it into your network and you're good to go. With 4 2TB Samsungs and a small SSD boot drive, the whole rig draws 30-40 watts. Handles software RAID5 at gigE speeds just fine.

I have this motherboard. I don't think this motherboard has USB 3.0. although the description says it has 3 3.0 ports. unless they change the design and still use use the same product line.

Exactly. I have an old AMD BE-2400 running at 2.7GHz on the stock heatsink and no voltage bump that shows 7.1 in Win7 for a processor score. It's definitely better then the stock but twice of nothing is still nothing.

I got a case and a psu from previous deals. Havent put together a pc in a while. Do I need a cooler with this, or should it be included? TIA

I got in on the ECS motherboard for $20. Along with the G550 its plenty powerful. Havent run any bluray isos yet though or 3D blu rays.

Don't try to make people confused about something that you never know. He asked about Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4Ghz, not the Pentium Dual-Core E6600 3.06Ghz one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Pro...6819115003

Wow, my computer that is almost 5 years old is 25% faster than this? I've been out of the computer game too long!

no, YOU are WRONG !
ark.intel.com/products/27250

how are you guys getting free shipping? The cart shows free shipping option but at the final page of checkout I only see the non-free (min $8) shipping options.

Paying $50 for Inner Circle Membership.

So you are totally oblivious to the "$0 free econoshipping" option in the Edit cart page and the free shipping over $50 signs all over the tigerdirect.com pages??

The problem is that even though they claim free shipping and show it as an option in the Edit cart page, the free shipping options is not displayed in the final ordering page. Bait and switch!

3 months ago.. A similar yet more expensive deal hit FP. The cheap intel motherboards recently have spoiled us!

Holly COW!!! $65 in rebates to get the price down to $79. It is not worth the risk.

Get the CPU alone for $20 AR.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applic...CatId=7237

Find some cheap RAM (~$25 for 8GB). Get a motherboard of your liking. Do a happy dance.

65$ rebate. forget that :D

Yeah those deals are sweet but also (If I remember correctly) the deal you are speaking of had like a 15 dollar rebate while this one has 65 dollars in rebates. Also the other deal was on newegg, some people have had bad experiences with td and will not buy from them (well relatively they would probably buy a 5 dollar core i7 lol)

I hate that I missed that deal. Would really help to finish my cheapskate HTPC build now. I wasn't ready for it then.

it was also $25 a couple times after that, not as slick as $20, but still... i'm still waiting on an SSD or maybe even just a 1-2 TB hdd for the right price to complete my build. i put it in the the corsair carbide 200R, but haven't been using...

Tempted because I need mobo/CPU/memory (<$100) to upgrade an older system, but I think I'll hold off for something more stable. I'm not really concerned about putting up any great performance numbers, but the fact that both the mobo/CPU are more or less discontinued now and that a lot of reviewers indicate their experience was less than acceptable, leads me to hold off for something better.

Can anyone recommend a solid mobo/CPU/memory combo or piecewise for < $100? Rebates don't really bother me as much as DOAs & RMAs.

Are Ttigerdirect reliable? I tried a few times and neve got them after the loong rebate process and swore never again. However, I'm seeing some good deals lately on tigerdirect that have rebates. Hmmm.

22% of the folks who reviewed this exact motherboard on NewEgg are claiming DOA and other odd issues right out of the box. Not worth taking the risk since you have to pay to ship the motherboard back and wait 3 weeks for a replacement from the manufacturer. Some people even griped that their replacement boards were having the same malfunction(s) as the board they had returned. Then there is the somewhat large rebate to deal with... gonna pass but sure was tempting before I researched the motherboard.

Agree'd. Saving a couple bucks isn't worth dealing w/ a system that's constantly flaking out... Problem is: I'm not sure that anything is this price range won't have similar inconsistencies & failures.

I agree. I purchased the deal with newegg for 99 dollars and after a week the mobo died. I returned it to newegg they stated that the mobo serial number didn't match and sent it back to me. I had to call CS and plead with them that this was from their store. I later received a new one two weeks later and that mobo was defective either that or the cpu was also defective. I ended up returning both the cpu and mobo for rma and finally got the system up in running. It was the worst experience I've had with newegg and I've been doing business with them for over 10yrs. I don't believe they are on the same level as they used be. It is a decent system for the cost of 99 dollars without rebates. I don't know if I would be inclined to do this deal. Like others have said in the past it might be better to go with a G530 or something similar.

I have this mobo. All you have to do is get a dvi to hdmi adapter and it will passthrough audio and vid.

If I buy Apu, who will man the kwik-e-mart?

I know! He works for Min. Wage and gets robbed and shot by Snake twice a month!

i think the Fx-4100 and free motherboard for $90 from microcenter is the best way to go. or Fx-6100 for $10 more. Unless you are looking for a lower power HTCP. Both these combos will blow the mentioned setups of G550 and Ops CPU away

add +20 for ram

Both of the APU systems I've laid hands on have been prebuilt. One from HP and one from Asus. They were both rock solid stable with zero hardware issues. Now the Radeon video driver + FireFox + Adobe reader resulted in some weird transparent text/graphics in PDFs though, never could solve that one with out removing FireFox and using chrome instead. Anyway, the factory built FM1 APU equipped rigs run superbly when you choose the A8 and a decent manufacturer from my experiences.


:lmao::lmao::lmao:

Still live, but final day.

$65 rebates, which is a plus since it increases cashback.

If you don't pay tax that makes it $65.20 after cashback. Great deal.

cashback? did not see this in the post - please elaborate?

Its sad to see so much lack of education here. This A4-3400 CPU is slower than CPUs from 6 YEARS ago.....yes, its even slower than core2duo era chips from intel. Even the sandy bridge based celeron chips blow the A4-3400 CPU away by a long margin.

Education is key to our reality.

delete

Actually, you are both wrong AND right.

There is the Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4Ghz, Conroe) and the Pentium Dual Core E6600 (3.06Ghz, Wolfdale). Both are LGA775 CPU's and are actually in the Core 2 Duo family in terms of architecture.

The A4-3400 is noticeably faster than the aged Conroe based C2D but not as fast as the newer Wolfdale PDC is.

and you win the illogical award for the day lol.

Conroe and wolfdale have the same IPC performance as they are the same architecture yet you incorrectly advised that "A4-3400 is noticeably faster than the aged Conroe based C2D but not as fast as the newer Wolfdale PDC is."

Quite funny.

mr rebates has 6% cashback + any cashback credit card has 1% = 7%

You spout on about "education" but only offer meaningless, and wrong, opinion. Try "educating yourself" and looking at he numbers, this is a very decent CPU for the price, which is the point.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html

Although your comments make you appear to be someone who should be guarding a bridge, I will go ahead and address your stupidity.

Conroe is the 1st generation Core 2 Duo.
Wolfdale is 2nd generation Core 2 Duo.

Wolfdale is cooler running and has 1 cycle faster L2 cache than Conroe does. Other parts of the chip have also been optimized and it includes SSE4 support, which Conroe does not.

The Pentium Dual Core E6600 is actually a Wolfdale-3M part, to be specific, with 2Mb of cache (rather than the full 3Mb common to E7xxx series Wolfdale Core 2 parts).
On the other hand, as the high end of the Conroe line, the C2D E6600 included 4Mb of L2 cache, rather than the 2Gb common to the E6300/E6400 series.

Both of these parts operate on on a 1066Mhz bus.

The big point you missed though "Captain Illogical" is that the C2D E6600 is a 2.4Ghz part but the PDC E6600 is a 3.06Ghz part -- which makes for a fairly large performance difference.
This is especially true when you consider the slightly faster (albeit smaller) L2 cache on the Wolfdale part, the slight tweaks Intel made to the Wolfdale's internal state machine, and the addition of SSE4.

Appreciate many of the constructive posts made in this thread.

Sometimes, you just need a cheap part to run the fileserver. This board has solid caps and the CPU looks to be fairly low power, and since it only needs to communicate by ssh, the gpu weirdness shouldn't be much of an obstacle.

Cheaper than (or ~same as) an atom with a gob of free ram thrown in alongside.

Calendar your rebates, people.
https://www.4myrebate.com/Claim/Registration

A friend jumped on this deal a few hours after the OP posted about it on 12/12. Says he's only being offered $45 in rebates making the AR price $95 instead of $75. Did anybody actually qualify for $65 worth of rebates?

deal dead i think. $95.

You don't provide any details, but I'm going to guess she's overlooking the memory rebate has a quantity of 2.

He didn't say which rebates he applied for but looking at TD's website now, the bundle is still available...current price is $139.95 with $45 in rebates ($5 for mainboard and two $20 rebates for the RAM). The $139.95 price agrees both with my friend's 12/12/2012 invoice and with comments in this thread implying that there were $65 in rebates (thus bringing final price to $74.95). This suggests that there was an additional $20 rebate active on 12/12?

Unfortunately the OP didn't list many details in the original post. Is there any way to find out the rebate breakdown as it was on 12/12?

Edit: Nevermind. Look like TD's rebate center link has an 'archived rebates' feature that lets you plug in an order # and it'll show you the applicable rebates for that order. Indeed there was a $20 rebate for the AMD processor that's no longer in effect for new orders. So the rebate total indeed is $65. Discrepancy solved. Thanks.