So I've decided to buy the following, I was wondering If this is suitable for what I want it to do, I will be buying within the next couple months (torrenting, 1080p streaming to main pc, backup/storage). I3-2120 - Overkill or suitable? MSI Z77A-G43 Z77 - I'm assuming the gigabit ethernet on this is good enough? 4x Samsung F4 Ecogreen 2TB HDD Seasonic X-650 PSU Corsair Vengeance 4GB 1600mhz Any suggestions? I also need a cheap router which won't bottleneck the ethernet. Oh and Is it even possible to get 1080p throughput out of the F4 drives? I like to leave some time before purchase musing over my final setup so It's good for me to start now This will be my last thread I promise!
650W PSU? Why? You could easily use a 500W or lower without any bother at all, there's no discrete GPU in that rig to pull power, and the rest aren't going to kill it. I'd also be tempted to see if I could find an older SB board (H series?) rather than a brand new Z77 to save some cash as you won't be using the features of Z77. As for drive speed, it's fine. Mechanical drives can sustain read speeds that are fast enough for 1080p with ease.
Answering the last bit... Blu-Ray has a max bitrate of 54 48Mbit/s which, assuming i can divide this afternoon, is 6.75MB/s... So any HDD is more than fast enough... & you'll obviously need to be able to put 54 48 Mbit/s through the network which likewise should be no problem whatsoever.
The PSU is waay over the top, you could use a 400W without any issues. And those HDDs can cope with 1080 no problem, they can do 100MB/s+, and say you have a blu ray rip at 35Mbits, that's less than 5MB/s, so it won't be a problem. I could be completely wrong with the numbers, but you can stream high bitrate 1080p without any issues.
Thanks for the advice. The PSU can easily be changed to a 650W coolermaster GX PSU, which will only cost me £60 as opposed to the rather insane £120 for that seasonic. IMO when I get down to £60 for PSU, going any lower is just making me feel uneasy. I feel like why get a similarly priced PSU that goes up to 400W? Then again, efficiency is grossly affected by the % load, so all of you may be right in your assertions. I'll try to look for a 400-500W PSU. Motherboard wise, I tried and tried to find a cheaper mobo with the features I wanted, I.E support for SATA III, USB 2.0 and 4 RAM slots, etc, can't find anything cheaper. I've realised this entire setup even with the cheaper PSU has me over-budget, was wondering if a G620 CPU would be sufficient for what I need? would save me £50.
Everything is overkill. I3-2120 -> Celeron G530 MSI Z77A-G43 Z77 -> lowend H67/H77 board Seasonic X-650 PSU -> Seasonic X-400FL or something much cheaper. The whole thing will use 70-80W top at load. Keep in mind the efficiency is not that great difference at low power consumption. 50W @ 89% efficiency (gold) = 56W from the socket 50W @ 82% efficiency (bronze) = 60W from the socket 50W @ 65% efficiency (worst ATX PSU possible) = 77W from the socket.
My Teeny Tiny AMD Dual core can do all the above (1080p storage: Yes, Streaming: Good Chance) It's the HP Microserver N40L, it's a very capable machine, Only minor issues are Raid, It can only do Raid 0 or 1, so if you want Raid 5 or 6 or something, then you will need to buy a new Raid Card on top, but otherwise, it's very good. Sam
Same here. I have an AM3 system with Athlon II X3 440 @ 2GHz that can do all of this. It uses a 430W PSU which doubles up as the CPU cooling fan, reducing my fan-count by one. Also, why 'cheap router'? Hmm - I'm just myself upgrading from a 5 year old DLink 524 to an ASUS RT-N16 this week, so I'll let you know (Yay employee discount!)
That's true in general... ...but the OP was talking about using an onboard Gb network controller to connect to the main PC for streaming, so i assumed it was wired... it's also worth noting that the 48Gb/s (wrong figure in original post) is also the max for blu-ray - the average data rate is nearer to 35Gb/s from recollection... ...& that's assuming the OP's after straight ripped blu-ray playback - rather than, for example, h.264 & aac recodes in a mkv container, where it will normally be *much* lower d.t. using more efficient codecs than mpeg2.
I couldn't see where it clearly said that all the connections were wired, best to be sure in the planning stages.
In the end, I downgraded my motherboard to a MSI B75MA-P45, my CPU to a G620 and while I'm still looking for a power-supply that I want, I see no problems in the foreseeable future on that end. Last order of business is my router. I have a sky DSL2640S and apparently it runs at 10/100 speeds. I've seen vastly conflicting opinions (It's the internet, was to be expected really), but it seems that the generally accepted opinion is that because the ethernet ports themselves are only 10/100, before we even reach the internals, any setup through this router would be consequently NOT full gigabit speeds. If this is the case then I guess I'll have to buy a cheap dedicated switch and chain it up with the router or something.
Correct, if you connect a gigabit PC to a 10/100 switch or router you will get at most 100Megabits per second. To make the most of Gigabit either buy a router with gigabit ports, or as suggested by a gigabit switch, this will allow anything connected to the gigabit ports to work at 1000Mbps anything that then needs to get to the router (ie WAN; e-mail, internet traffic etc) will then be at 100Mbps which is most likely faster than your broadband anyway.
Ok I've had a little bit of a look at 8-Port Gigabit switches, have looked at the following: Netgear GS108 Netgear GS608 TP-Link TL-SG1008D HP ProCurve 1410-8G To be frank, I would have just gone for the GS108 If It wasn't for the stories of capacitor failure. While I do have an old soldering iron, It's not really something I want to be dealing with a few years down the line(though I hear they fixed it in one of their revisions) My next thought was just to go for the TP-Link and indeed this is what I'm leaning towards. On the expensive end there is either the GS608 or the life-time warranty ProCurve. Any suggestions? Would love to save £20 and go for the TP-Link knowing It will last me a decade anyway.
Just go with a GS108 or similar. Anything more would be overkill and you wouldn't use any of the additional feature of something like the procurve. I wouldn't worry too much about it dying in a few years, as by then prices will be lower and we may even see cat 6a and 10gbit ethernet making it to enthusiest home use by then. Also do you really need to go to gigabit? If all your content is to stay on your media box and will only ever be streamed to your main PC then you can do it on a 100mbps network easy. At the full 48mbps that a blu ray needs for streaming you are looking at about 5.86MB/s throughput needed for the network. A 100mbps network should give you 12MB/s throughput easy. The only reason to go to gigabit is if multiple users will be streaming from the box at the same time or if you will be copying the "linux ISOs" (that is the only thing torrents are used for right?) across your network to different systems.
infrastructure is very important, going to gigabit is recommended. if you are doing ANY file copying that uses full 100Mbps, you'll see a decrease in performance on internet responsiveness. even my punny ARM based low end Synology NAS can saturate a 100Mbps ethernet easily, i've experienced the slow internet when copying files, it's horrendous. and yes, hardware is overkill if only used for streaming video. my low end NAS can do that without problem, even when running many other services.
Sorry Andy but 100MBit on any router or home setup should be BANNED now. 10MB/s? What is this the 90s? We should be on 10G by now! /grump. Sure, streaming you won't be pulling 80MB/s, but the MOMENT you transfer a large file you'll have regretted not going GigE cause it's seconds/minutes vs HOURZZzzzzzzz "Oh I'll just update and transfer that Nvidia driverrrzzzzzzzzzzzzz..." I constantly hit a wall on my internal GigE network at 80-100MB/s and am thinking about adding another wire for teaming between my routers, but it's 25M
I would love to see 10gbit too but I can't see it working in anything but an office environment. That is unless they move to doing it via powerline adaptors as cat 6a cable is HUGE and fibre is impractical in a home environment - it's too easy to break the fibre if made to bend too much.
But.. but.. Cat6a makes you feel like you have PROPER bandwidth. Any cable you need two hands to install (and preferably SCREWS IN) is worth the effort for geek factor alone