Matching the AMD 4850e and the ASUS M3A78-EMH HDMI Micro ATX board will not help you break any performance records.  It will however give you a great HTPC system that is fairly cheap to set up, very cheap to power and easy to cool quietly.  While we would all like to see AMD processors at the top of the performance charts, TweakTown’s review proves that AMD is still the king of some specific types of PC.

“AMD has for quite some time provided the most power efficient processors on the market. In fact, the ULV versions of the Athlon 64 X2 processors have been able to draw as little as 45watts, and at speeds of above 2GHz. Now, that’s something even the laptops would love to have running in them, yet they are desktop processors. How’s that for efficiency?

Today we are testing out AMD’s latest addition to its 45watt TDP family with a clock speed of 2.5 GHz; that’s pretty efficient for such a powerful processor with Dual Core functions. Rather than just being a CPU review, today we are looking at the new Athlon 4850e processor as a HTPC component in conjunction with the AMD 780G chipset and Radeon HD 3450 graphics card.”

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