Need help building a dedicated pc for music

A Celeron G530 should be plenty good enough for a music server. Hell, Ive run them off of Atoms (330 and D510) in the past without a hitch. Those 2 particular ones were about equal to a Tualatin PIII 1GHz. The only part where you will want CPU horsepower is encoding a rip. Both of my Atoms took ~7 minutes to encode a complete album to FLAC.
 
J. River is awesome. I have been using them for years.

Pentiums will work greatly, as will AMD's current quad and 8 cores. Windows has so much going on at any given instance that you need processing power nowadays. Nothing like having a V-8 under the hood :thmbsp:

JN
 
as i said in the first post, i will be using a dacmagic 100 connected through usb, and will use foobar2000 as the music player. If i start seeing problems running windows 7 i might end up switching to ubuntu (if im not mistaken it isnt as hard to run, correct me if im wrong)
 
But in his server I'm going to assume he's going to be ripping CD's into it. Celeron's gonna slow every else down - on top of Win 7's massive recorce hogginess. I mean sure, he *can* use a Celeron, and it will work. But the whole experience is going to be painful. Ripping, importing, playing, cataloging, displaying, importing, tagging, etc - whether done automatically by J. River or manually, will bog down. Even more while playing music.

JN
 
In all honesty, this isnt something you really need to spec out so high. Ive done lots of servers over the last 15 or so years, and I see oftentimes people buying too much hardware for the required job. Thats fine and dandy, but you have to have a happy medium between its intended tasks, cost, and performance. Ive counted more times than not, people with humongous servers speced out like a high end gaming machine...they do nothing but sit their idling away serving up files. If you arent going to use all of those resources, theres no need to buy them ;).
 
You are correct Bob. :thmbsp:

But isin't have more than enough better than not enough? Especially since processor's cost so little nowadays. You can get an 8 core AMD system for the same price as that Celeron system. So at this price why not? Because it's more than you need today? How about in the near future when the movie bug hits because the software can run it? Better to have more than you need when it comes to PC's because they get outdatted so fast.

I'm just sayin........

AMD 8 core for the same price....:thmbsp:

JN
 
I have an AMD 4 core it rips just fine .The four core i5 I have also is faster though even the retired p4 would rip kinda slow though. Cheapest AMD 8 core is like $159 by itself sandy bridge Celron is like $60.00 1155 motherboard 45-59 ~ The thing is Op has a good upgrade path with an Intel 1155 solution should he need to.
If it just serves music and rips CD's the celron would be fine AMD bulldozer/piledriver would be nice but overkill for a dedicated home server You could easily serve a few neighbors at the same time with one of those. If I could find an AMD 8 core and board both for $120.~ I would be on that like today:D
 
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^^ Ha. Yea, it is overkill, isin't it. :thmbsp: Gotta love them cheap CPU prices. I have 4 HTPC's. 1 is an Intel dual core, 1 is an AMD dual core 5000, my main is an AMD quad core HUGE rig, and my last is the 8 core. Gotta love the horse power :banana: .

JN
 
Theres nothing wrong in the least as having too much juice, but when you want to do something cheap that works, you gotta choose your path somewhat carefully :thmbsp:
 
Those 8 cores are pretty bad asst if you feed them the right software but amd needs to drop the prices a bit on the Zambezi 's

The AMD is my daily driver the i5 is for production it's the worker bee. It works well and never breaks a sweat so it probably won't need an up grade. I do have some more ram coming for it on the same order as the new sound card for the AMD rig.
both work well for the jobs they need to do here .I`ve overclocked the AMD . it sped it up a bit .Might put a bulldozer or Zambezi in the AMD rig later I wonder how the Zambezi overclocks have to check in at overclock.net.
 
Im all Intel over here at the moment. I migrate between both, no bias towards either company. My main rig is a i5 2500K, second is a Q6600, SU4100 (1,3GHz Core2) laptop, then my dual Xeon L5420 virtual machine host. Im all Intel right now because of their excellent Linux support. AMD isnt bad in that regard, but still not up to the support Intel provides.
 
Glad both companies are around or we would be looking at much higher prices for
sure .Both make good products. I'm cool with both of mine even the old p4 it served me well for years bought it in 03 didn't get the AMD 4 core till 2010 then the I5 in 2011. I'm typing here with 7 browser tabs open listening to and recording (audacity)
a 320kb album stream from Mog all at the same time proc. cores are about 8-12%
that includes running windows and this is the AMD box if I were on the i5 would be 3% those sandy bridge chips get a lot done per clock cycle for sure
I hear the Ivy bridges are a little faster I think the 2500k is the spot for the money though. excellent chip.
regards .
 
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