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From left-over parts I have RAM, graphics, Sound (as below), plus fan, case and OS (W7).

* XFX HD-645X Radeo HD6450 1GB Graphics Card
* Xonar DG 5.1 Sound Card
* 4GB GSkill F2-6400CL5D DDRII 800 PC2-6400 CL5-5-5-15

I'm looking for a low cost solution for a board and CPU to be able to use these parts in a HTPC (no gaming).
Would welcome any suggestions. Thanks.

New memory is so cheap ($20 or less for 4 GiB of DDR3) that you should not constrain yourself to using your old DDR2 memory. If you were dead-set on using it, a socket-AM2+ motherboard with the AMD 785G chipset like the $61 ASRock A785GM-LE with an $80 Athlon II X3 455 or a $65 Athlon II X2 255 processor would work.

I linked to some cheap LGA1155 motherboards here that would work with an Intel Sandy Bridge $88 Pentium G850, $65 Pentium G620 or $135 Core i3-2105 LGA1155 processor and some DDR3 memory for your HTPC.

My HTPC is doing well with an AMD Llano processor in Socket-FM1. You could certainly find a Lllano-based solution or two as well. The graphics core in the Llano APU would team with your Radeon HD6450 for improved graphics performance.

Since you've already got a graphics card suitable for HTPC use, I second the recommendation of a SB-Pentium G. H61 motherboards aren't expensive and you can get new DDR3 memory so cheaply, it isn't worth it to build an obsolete system just to re-use DDR2.

I've got an i3-530 on a GA-H55M-USB3 board in another machine. Matched with the right board, would the i3-2105 give noticeable better on-board graphics than the i3-530 ?

BeachNut wrote:

Would the Core i3-2105 give noticeably better on-board graphics than the Core i3-530 ?

Yes, they're better than Westmere, but Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics are still significantly inferior to your Radeon HD6450 graphics card. The best Llano integrated graphics are about equal to the Radeon HD6450 graphics card. AMD's "Dual Graphics" allows the APU's graphics processor to crossfire with the Radeon HD6450 for slightly improved gaming performance.

You can see some Sandy Bridge graphics benchmarks vs. the best Westmere processor here:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/20188/17

In this review you can see Llano's graphics capabilities compared to Sandy Bridge's:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21208/15

Here it is again with faster memory:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21255/6

And again:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21730/8


Your old Core i3-530 processor and micro-ATX H55 motherboard could serve as the basis for your HTPC (particularly when paired with your Radeon HD6450 graphics card). You could then get a new Sandy Bridge processor and LGA1155 motherboard for whatever more demanding applications you might currently run on the Core i3-530.

I did put this graphics card into the i3-530 machine in the past but the HD playback seemed to be worse and the W7 performance index dropped ! Not sure what I did wrong