OT: New PC! Sorta...

Fyron · #1 November 27th, 2007, 05:46 PM

If it isn't even going to be used for playing back files locally, you don't even need a pentium 4/athlon level CPU for the job (though you'll have trouble finding anything with SATA or lots of IDE ports with a P3 or something

)... Just figure out what CPU you can get for a motherboard with the drive connectors you need, that draws the minimum amount of power. No point in putting in a power-hungry CPU (I'm looking at you Athlon/Sempron and Pentium/Celeron) to just act as a file server; might as well minimize the electric requirements, for the lowest cost of running it. Look into micro-atx style motherboards/processors; some sort of Pentium M CPU would be great. You can still use such systems for local playback if you need to, naturally.

AgentZero · #2 November 27th, 2007, 08:53 PM

Well, the cheapest CPU that I can find is a Celeron but it fits into a LGA775, so I can use motherboards that support SATA and so forth.

I'm still rather lost in the OS department though. If people are going to be connecting through Samba, it doesn't even really need much of a GUI really, although it'd be nice to have one to set the thing up...