[USFORCES]

Friend has $200 bucks to spend, needs CPU, motherboard and memory. Anyhow what would be better AMD or i3?
Reason I'm asking is I haven't been in the AMD market in a while and don't know what would be the better of the two with the little cash he has to spend, He mostly surfs the internet and plays movies on his TV, no gaming..

Thank you

 

[King Who Dat]

APU. That would save him on a gpu if he's planning on buying a discrete as well.

 

[aznpersuazn]

Dual core apu is your best value.

 

[looniam]

you can think about this:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: AMD A8-5600K 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor ($109.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Asus F2A55-M LK PLUS Micro ATX FM2 Motherboard ($59.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Smart Tracer 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $199.97
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-02-28 17:50 EST-0500)

 

[USFORCES]

Thanks for the replies

APU AMD A8-5600K better than the Intel APU dual core? Also APU/CPU's run movies really good, also how do you hook HDMI up to it?

 

[drnilly007]

If the motherboard has on board HDMI. I used to have a celeron g540 and it had Intel HD1000 graphics and it did movies flawlessly on 1080p

 

[USFORCES]

Quote:

Originally Posted by drnilly007

If the motherboard has on board HDMI

I see this is new to me

 

[looniam]

Quote:

Originally Posted by USFORCES

I see this is new to me

quite a few motherboards have an HDMI ouptut, both intel and AMD. though the board i posted before just has D-sub and DVI this has HDMI:
MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 FM2 AMD A75 $59.99

for the low requirements that you are looking for both intel and an AMD APU are quite fine. the only short coming of an AMD is getting a FM2 socket that has a very limited upgrade path. with an intel socket 1155 motherboard your buddy can then upgrade to any sandy/ivy bridge i3, i5 or i7 later on.

here is an intel suggestion:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Pentium G2020 2.9GHz Dual-Core Processor ($64.98 @ Outlet PC)
Motherboard: MSI B75MA-E33 Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($59.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Smart Tracer 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($29.99 @ Newegg)
Total:$154.96
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-03-01 01:06 EST-0500)