mobo overkill?

I have been vacillating recently about my htpc. At the moment I have an Asus M4A78-htpc with Athlon ii .x250 processor and 1.7 gb ram running xp, so pretty old.

I don't really use it for games or if I do it is stuff that isn't requiring fabulous graphics (Portal) but I fancy something snappier and was going to go for an Intel mobo leading to a choice between an older mobo/processor (Maplin have some older bundles that look ok for my needs) or the new skylake stuff. Then I thought maybe I should just stick with AMD, I mean what I need it for ie internet and media is hardly requiring cutting edge computing power but am also thinking in terms of power consumption, if there is any great variability there.

Budget isn't much - £130 for mobo/processor/RAM as I want to reuse everything else. Oh and I want to try and run Linux. Any ideas on the best way to go?

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.

mobo overkill?