Just had the (dis)pleasure of using an AMD E-350 Zacate for sending 3,000 ebooks (a whole bunch of fanfics that need to be weeded out) to my PRS-350. I was hoping to log some reading time before going to bed. Alas, the whole process was taking so long that I fell asleep before it finished. Calibre also takes a while to check which books are on the PRS-350 whenever it's initially connected.
There's definitely a processor bottleneck with Zacate as it was pegged at 50% CPU usage meaning it's maxing out one core (not surprising when even a Pentium 4 beats it in terms of single-threaded performance). The question is, how high should I go on the CPU? I don't plan on doing any conversions with this PC. The only use I need it for is:
- Transfer ebooks to PRS-350.
- Generate epub catalogs of libraries.
My problem with Zacate is it's too underpowered. The epub catalog generation, while slow, wasn't completely unbearable on the E-350. It's really just transferring ebooks to the reader that's taking forever. The question is how much CPU do I need to speed that up before transfers become bottlenecked by limitations of USB2 or flash memory speed on the reader? Celeron G530 (~$50)? Core i3-2100 (~$110)? Core i5-3450 (~$200)?