Which processor do you like? i5-2500S vs. i3-2120

[shatter]

I held off on buying a processor/motherboard last November to wait for the new sandy bridge processors to come out and I have two processors I am looking at for the new sage box.

My planned usage is one HD200, one HD300 and one SageTV Client. Two viewers are HDTV compatible and the third SDTV. Most usage is two viewers working out of three at any time. I only have one tuner so it would be at most, one recording while two playbacks are going, along with comskip.

The processors are...

i5-2500S Quad Core (4 thread) 65W 2.7ghz, 3.7ghz turbo
i3-2120 Dual Core (4 thread) 65W 3.3ghz

The i5 processor supprts Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) which the i3 does not. Do I need this to run virtualbox?

I don't know squat about these 'S' series processors and perhaps they are not appropriate to use for a HTPC. Since the HTPC sits idle a lot of the time the 'S' processor looked interesting. Do I care about quad core vs dual core since they are both 4 thread? Just go with raw speed in the i3?

Thanks!
Chad

[Fuzzy]

Just the sage tasks (serving up to sage extenders, and clients) could be handled fine by a 5 year old celeron. You don't need a new processor for that. However, if you want to do any comskip analysis, then either of those would be fine. I think I'd lean towards teh i5, simple because it supports some more features (like the VT-d you mentioned). VT-d isnt' required to run VirtualBox, but it is used by a lot of virtualization software to provide direct hardware access to virtual machines. It is also dependent on the motherboard supporting this feature, otherwise it's useless.

If you are looking to use Placeshifter from HD-PVR recordings, then I'd recommend the faster i3 - placeshifter transcoding is single core, so the faster cores will help.

[bastafidli]

Actually I have seen huge performance improvement since I upgraded from my P4 with 1GB of memory to my i3 with 4GB. So processors and memory on server do matter (I do not run comskip or similar things).

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by bastafidli

Actually I have seen huge performance improvement since I upgraded from my P4 with 1GB of memory to my i3 with 4GB. So processors and memory on server do matter (I do not run comskip or similar things).

I'm betting the Memory had a MUCH greater impact than the processor in your case. I'd wager your P4 was never over about 15% utilization, but with 1GB, I'm betting your system drive was thrashing often.