Home Server I'm building

[Ten-Speed]

I'm in need of some help for WHS 2011. I know some of this is overkill for a home server, but I need it to be able to all 10 PCs/laptops that would be on it. It's possible the PCs would be using the server at peak capacity, so that's why it was built the way it is.

ASUS Xonar Essence STX 24bit, SAMSUNG Black Model SH-B123L – OEM, NZXT Phantom PHAN-001WT White ATX Case, AMD Phenom II X6 Black 1100T (HDE00ZFBGRBOX), 1 x Western Digital 2 TB SATA Cavier Green, 4 x Western Digital 1.0 TB SATA Cavier Green, G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB Sticks) Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL, ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AMD 890FX Motherboard, 2 x Sapphire Radeon HD 6870

Any suggestions or comments?

Thanks I appreciate the help.

 

[jin0]

why the sound card and 2 vid cards on WHS machine?

 

[TheLastBoyscout]

Hi Ten-Speed,

Almost all you list would go fine into a gaming rig, but for a home server, the video cards are irrelevant (you log in remotely or via the dashboard and all you'll get is some 2D window) and the sound card is not going to be used at all.
The motherboard also falls into the "gaming" category:

ASUS: "Hear realistic gaming sounds without any lag on the 890FX platform"

Neither of the above mentioned components hurts a WHS 2011 per se, but it hurts your wallet, your energy bill and probably your ears as the video cards and the CPU generate unnecessary noise. Typically these are the things you want to avoid when you build a home server that's running 24/7.
More important things are a good network chip set (not sure about the Marvell 8059 on that ASUS board, but I'd take an Intel NIC to be safe) and a router capable of handling the expected traffic. Assuming you are on GigE (which will get you 100 MByte/s at best), a fast dual core or a low powered quad core (905e) is perfectly capable of handling the load.

Check this forum: There are plenty of threads that discuss setups that are geared towards home servers.

my 2c
-TLB

 

[Ten-Speed]

The reason for the video cards and sound card is because the server at peak load may have to stream the equivalant of 10 Bluray ISOs. I was just under the impression that I needed them. If not, awesome, saves me a lot of money.

 

[s0rce]

Video card and sound card don't have anything to do with streaming.

Blu-ray (IIRC) is about 50 megabits per second. So 10 of them at once is about 500 megabits, or 62.5 MB/second. Gigabit ethernet caps out at 125MB/sec so this is doable. My little AMD e-350 zacate server can do 60-80MB/sec sustained so you dont need much computing power.

 

[scaarbelly]

You don't need a very powerful pc at all for what you want. What you need is bandwidth through your network. The client pc's will do the actual work for playing the videos.

 

[Jesse B]

The only way you'll need any serious power is if you're transcoding on the fly. If you're just straight streaming, it won't tax your system too much at all. Just make sure you have a solid Gbit network.

 

[af22]

i think the op is referring to the new WHS11 feature that allows real time transcoding of video to stream over the internet via the web interface. If that is the case, you need to find out if the WHS11 transcoding supports DXVA, or if it's completely done by the cpu ( i think it is done with the cpu only as WHS11 is designed to run headless and the ATI drivers will not install on WHS11 ).

I recommend you get a beefy cpu with a mobo that has full sata slots. The x6 is an interesting choice, but it might be better to get a sandy bridge i5...

 

[Poplap]

actually the x6 might far a little better then the i5 as the sb i5 is not HTed so its only capable of 4 frames renders at a time where as the x6 can do 6 frames all be it a little slower. now if it was an SB i7 with HT this is a different story.

 

[geant90]

I have a 3.0 Dual core and i streamed the same movie to 3 locations. Its 1080p and i wouldnt of tested more but dont have more pc/htpc

 

[Ten-Speed]

Awesome. Thanks for your suggestions and help.