Hi Amigadave,
Have you looked at the new i3-3225?
It has the HD4000 IGP that has, up until now only been available in the K versions of the Ivy Bridge i5's and i7's.
I'm going to use one of these in my mini itx HTPC!
Cheers
Yes, I looked at all the Core i3 products as well as some Core i5 CPU's, but for what we are trying to accomplish, the AMD APU products are a much better fit, plus they provide twice the video performance and a lower cost than the Intel equivalents.
I still like the products I outlined earlier in this thread. The only thing I will change is possibly switching to the A10 model APU's and a FM2 motherboard, if they are priced within my budget.
I also like the Hybrid CrossFireX technology that allows us to add a discrete video card into one of the PCIe x16 slots and Windows7 Pro will see the video card in the PCIe slot, plus the video card portion of the APU, as one combined video card that is more powerful than either of the individual video cards are alone.
Same principle as system builders who buy a CrossFire, or SLI capable motherboard and install only one video card when they first build the system, but later they add an identical 2nd video card and enable the CrossFire, or SLI mode to use both cards together as one more powerful video card, when they have the money to add more performance. That makes more sense than removing the existing video card and selling it at a loss, then buying a more expensive and more powerful video card to replace the one that was removed. In fact, the CrossFireX technology can even support 3 video cards working in tandem, but I don't know if the Hybrid CrossFireX is able to support 3 video cards, with 2 of them being real PCIe cards and the third being the video card portion of the A8, or soon to be released A10 APU's.