Upgrading My HTPC(s): Part 2

Just like the real S-3 "Viking", that the U.S. Navy retired in 2009, and Lockheed has recently been trying to resurrect; there wasn't supposed be a "Part 2". Then on the way to upgrading the rest of my HTPC fleet, a funny thing happened..... I know; you're probably already rolling your eyes, right? So, I'm going to go ahead and explain the "why" and then the "how" of it. ..... And NO, I'm not doing this to make myself feel better about spending another $50. So here goes:

Last week I came across a motherboard on eBay that was packaged with a processor and the HSF (heat-sink-fan) that ended up costing $48 with free shipping. From a purely economic standpoint; if you can upgrade something for less than $50.... you should do it! So, here are the "players". It's an ASRock A75M-ITX with an AMD A6-3600 APU. We can start with that the processor alone often sells for around $50. Granted, it's cheap, but so are any of the hundreds of the P4 boards out there. But that still doesn't answer the question of why?

The machine that I was planing on not upgrading was the "Viking" HTPC in our master bedroom. It's hard to believe that it was originally build in the later part of 2012. A couple of years ago it got rebuilt into a Silverstone case with a very low-powered "Ivy Bridge" generation Celeron which occasionally struggles, but is still pretty usable. However, while Intel processors of the "Core" generation wipe the floor with AMD, their integrated graphics aren't anything to "write home about". So....., if you want something that does a nice job with video, where processing power takes a "backseat"; your pretty much back with AMD's APUs. 

In this case the A75 chipset boards are from second generation AMD APUs. The A6-3600 chip I'll be using will not only have 4 CPU cores, but also an onboard Radeon HD 6430 D GPU which is a pretty good thing for an HTPC. So, it comes down to the fact that this board would be significantly more powerful than the Celeron 847 for a fairly minimal investment. If we were to continue on our current use case scenario where we occasionally get on to the internet for Youtube and catching up with a TV show on a network site, I probably wouldn't bother. However, our changeover to using Kodi (XMBC) on a regular basis changes the hardware demands.The machine now routinely has to process 1080p streams. This is just something that Intel's integrated graphics of that generation does well. Which takes us back to the $50 economic answer to the technical question of whether or not I can/should upgrade a system. And that translates to be: You Bet, if the benefit/need is there and the price is low enough!