e3-1225 overkill for a HTPC?

[Harrod]

Anyone know if this would be a decent cheap system to use as a Unbuntu box for media streaming? I was perusing ebay and saw this and it seemed like it would be a pretty decent system to use.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/231877791239?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT

 

[Ken g6]

Xeon E3-1225 == i5 2400, unless it's using ECC RAM, which might make a RAM upgrade hard. Also note no Windows on that machine. Otherwise, looks decent to me.

 

[Harrod]

Thanks, I ended up picking one of them up.

 

[JeffMD]

Yea, good cpu. If you are going to dedicate it to a media server I would make sure all fans are 4 pin to take advantage of fan silencers on the motherboard, and use an SSD for a boot drive. The mechanical media drive can sleep when not in use but windows will never let the main drive sleep.

 

[ethebubbeth]

It depends on what you're doing. My 3570k is getting a workout decoding 10bit h.264 and upscaling with madVR.

If you're playing back content in Ubuntu with something like Kodi, you should be fine with the E3-1225.