Dual Xeons Overkill

oceancyc

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 9, 2004
Messages
497
I was thinking of building a media server with one of those Supermicro server cases paired with a couple Nocona Xeon 2.8ghz procs. For the time being, only a terabyte of storage would be used with possibly another tb added in a few months. Should I settle for my current mobo and proc wich is an MSI K8N Plat w/A64 3000 in an Antec SX1030 or proceed with the Supermicro or another route altogether?
 
Well my media server is a dual athlon xp 1800 setup with soon to be a couple terabytes of storage. That being said its way overkill for the application of a pure media server. If it were only serving media I would probably just got with the cheapest setup you can CPU wise and throw alot of ram in there.
 
For a media server it might be overkill for an HTPC it is overkill. I'd asume that you'll use some sort of RAID, probably 5?
 
RAID 5 was the plan. I plan to rip my DVD collection to the server and a little TV (mostly sports). This would probably only go to two TV's at the moment, possibly three down the line. I'm going to put the HD's in this enclosure . Not sure wich RAID card to get yet though.
 
the overkill is lessened if you use that processing power to do some post processing and or resizing with ffdshow. (I believe it is threaded for SMP, if it isn't, then a dually would be overkill)
 
FFDShow doesn't support SMP, your confused with the SSE2 optimized version.
 
Suppoedly if AndyIEG over at AVS got enough requests he would look into putting out anSMP friendly version but I just dont think there is enough interest.
 
I guess I wont upgrade to the Xeons then. At least now I have an excuse to move up to a Socket 939 board! Thanks for the replies.
 
Why do you need so muvh. hell my Media Rig is P3 800MHZ 384 ram and 20GB. Everything is streamed over a 100 based connection. Streams and can record my TV programs just fine :)
 
I'm going to use the server to record and play TV shows, music CD's and DVD's once I rip my entire collection to the server. Ripping with DVD Decrypter is a time consuming process if you've ever tried it. Keep in mind I'm compressing nothing to preserve quality. I can only imagine how long that would take with a P3 800MHZ :p
 
I could be wrong here, but I don't think that processing power is the limiting factor, timewise, for ripping DVDs.
 
Subliminal said:
I could be wrong here, but I don't think that processing power is the limiting factor, timewise, for ripping DVDs.

You arent wrong unless he is turning them into mountable images (easiest way to store them)
 
Bighitter said:
Suppoedly if AndyIEG over at AVS got enough requests he would look into putting out anSMP friendly version but I just dont think there is enough interest.
I would be interested. While utilizing more than one processor, you could apply much more filtering.
 
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