Budget: £400; £500 if I have to. Main uses of intended build: NAS Ripping DVDs, BDs, CDs Encoding videos acquired from said DVDs/BDs in a timely-fashion! Should be able to view freeview and record from a schedule Needs a HDMI output Parts required: Everything except a monitor and, possibly, the KB & Mouse. Previous build information (list details of parts): I have a spare key for 7 Home Premium around somewhere. Monitor resolution: 1920 x 1080 Storage requirements: 500GB minimum. Will you be overclocking: Nope. Any motherboard requirements (no. of USB, Xfire/SLI, fan headers): Not that I can think of. Extra information about desired system: Basically I want a small PC hooked up to my network to replace my current 250GB NAS that can store everything I want. I want it to be able to encode videos fairly quickly as I prefer having everything accessible in one place instead of having to keep swapping discs all the time. Being able to view the content via the TV would be a nice bonus but currently I'm content with viewing videos on my laptop. So I'm not in desperate need of having a fancy TV-friendly piece of software to view my media. Just browsing the drives and finding the video manually would do the trick for me. The DVR stuff is just something I've always wanted to have a play around with. I'm not at all sure what pieces of software are available to record TV but ideally I'd like it encoded in x264 in an MKV container like all my other stuff. Oh, and low power usage and quiet fans are a must!
Pick a case, and have a look at the CCL bundles... and budget for a Blu-Ray drive of course. dunx Thermaltake Bach, Antec 550W PSU, ASUS P5K-E + Q6600 + 4Gb of OCZ DDR2 + Intel 80 Gb SSD + WD caviar black 1 Tb + Terratec Cinergy DT2400 DVB-T card + GTX 460 OC + (?) DVD writer
I've put together a quick list of things... Mobo: Gigabyte GA-H55M-UD2H H5 - £63.62 CPU: i3 530 - £86.17 Case: Casecom MA-1199 - £18.43 PSU: Antec 380W EarthWatts - £35.98 RAM: Kingston 1066 1GB DDR3 - £13.26 Optical Drive: Samsung SH-S223 - £11.99 HDD: Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB x2 - £44.40 each Total: £329.99 I'm not too sure how this thing would do for power consumption so does anyone have any ideas of what I could do to keep it down to a minimum?
I'd bet you that case gets pretty noisy, with only one small exhaust fan. If media/NAS was the number one use, then an atom board would been ideal for lower power and noise. If you really have to encode (at a decent speed anyway) then you're going to need a more beefy machine like the one you specced above. But the drawback there is more heat, power and therefore noise. It depends, you either put up with more noise when you're watching TV and more power use (if it's a NAS I assume it's going to be on 24/7?) or you encode very slowly or on a different machine.
When you say "encode videos in a timely fashion" do you mean transcode - convert and compress? An i3 won't cut that, you should go for a quad, depending on the software you're using. If you just mean rip the disc and make an ISO, then your limit will be optical media read performance.
I'm thinking of going down the Atom route. Maybe a board with ION for HD playback? The thing is, how would I power it? I know I don't need anything more then 100w but where would I get a PSU that runs lower then that?
A lot of mini-itx cases have inbuilt power supplies. Take a look at Mini-ITX.com, that's where I got my Silverstone SG05B from.
