So I need system build advice for an audiophile. *scaled back, looking at NAS now*

88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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So I've been servicing a PC for a friend of mine for the past several years. It's mostly composed of hand me downs from my old PCs, and it's become somewhat of a frankenstein. I recently had to replace a bad mobo in it and he complained about things running rather slow lately.

He's running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2GB DDR, on Windows 7 which is old hardware, but should be an adequate system to say the least. But he has a 1TB HDD nearly full of music from his CD collection, and he runs iTunes. I know iTunes can be a hog and having such a massive music collection would only make matters worse in that regard. Not to mention that he still has probably 300-400GB of music that has yet to be ripped to iTunes from his CDs which will probably require about 1.5TBs of storage when its all said and done. On top of this, he runs apps that allow him to access his iTunes from anywhere on his iPhone which only increases the load.
Also, it's taken him quite a while to rip his CDs and a HDD failure would be devastating because of the time it took to do all of this.

So he asked me about a more powerful system, and I think it would be a good idea to start from scratch using new components, as you really don't save alot of money when building PCs out of used parts.


I honestly haven't had the need to build anything high end for myself or anyone else, so I'm not too familiar with whats out there, but here are my thoughts, and I would appreciate suggestions and recommendations as to what a good build would be for this purpose.
  • Quad Core CPU
  • 8GB of DDR3
  • PCIe Hardware RAID Controller
  • 2x 2TB HDDs @ RAID 1 (4x @ RAID 10 if he can afford it)
  • 60-120GB SSD for the Operating system
  • Low-mid end graphics card
  • Decent 2.1ch sound card. NO 5.1 or 7.1
  • Most likely will go with a full tower ATX setup for better cooling, and more HDD slots
  • 550-600w PSU?
Thanks in advance.
 
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DSF

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Oct 6, 2007
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What's the budget for this? I think you're way overestimating what he needs.

If it's just a music storage/listening box quad core isn't really necessary. That said, they're cheap enough that it doesn't hurt anything to get one.

You could just use onboard graphics rather than get a separate graphics card. If you do opt for a discrete card I'd get something cheap and passively cooled.

Full tower seems like a waste of money and space for this build. Processors (and graphics cards, although again I think getting anything more than a low-end passive card would be counter-productive if he doesn't intend to game) are trending toward lower power usage and heat, not more. A full tower isn't even needed to keep most gaming builds cool, let alone a little music box. I would either go with something micro-ATX (or maybe even ITX) to have a small footprint, or just go with a standard ATX mid-tower.

Since it's an audiophile rig I would opt for low noise over extreme cooling. There are nice offerings by Fractal Design, Antec, Corsair and NZXT in that arena that don't break the bank.

550-600W is far and away more power than this rig needs. A good 400W unit is more than plenty.
 

88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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What's the budget for this? I think you're way overestimating what he needs.

If it's just a music storage/listening box quad core isn't really necessary. That said, they're cheap enough that it doesn't hurt anything to get one.

You could just use onboard graphics rather than get a separate graphics card. If you do opt for a discrete card I'd get something cheap and passively cooled.

Full tower seems like a waste of money and space for this build. Processors (and graphics cards, although again I think getting anything more than a low-end passive card would be counter-productive if he doesn't intend to game) are trending toward lower power usage and heat, not more. A full tower isn't even needed to keep most gaming builds cool, let alone a little music box. I would either go with something micro-ATX (or maybe even ITX) to have a small footprint, or just go with a standard ATX mid-tower.

Since it's an audiophile rig I would opt for low noise over extreme cooling. There are nice offerings by Fractal Design, Antec, Corsair and NZXT in that arena that don't break the bank.

550-600W is far and away more power than this rig needs. A good 400W unit is more than plenty.
I generally prefer dedicated graphics, only to free up as much RAM as possible for general use. And I'm 99% certain that I have a couple of nVidia 8xxx series graphics cards still in the box somewhere. And if worse comes to worse, I'd just get some cheapy video card that supports dual monitor because he doesn't game, but he uses a TV as a secondary monitor for netflix, hulu etc.

But as for the ATX full tower, excuse me lol, I meant just standard. I have an old habit of referring to standard (mid tower) that way despite the fact I havent seen a full tower atx PC that was less than 15 years old lol.
However the reason for mid tower ATX would be the extra HDD ports, I know some mATX cases do often have several or more HDD ports, but youre often forced to cram them in, and I like to space them out whenever possible to aid in cooling.

As for the budget, I can't give an exact dollar amount yet, but I don't think that an issue so long as its within reason. My friend is the type of person who will spend what he needs to spend on something to do it right and wont cheap out if its important to him... like his music. I myself may have gone overboard, but I havent built a high end system since the socket 939 days so I don't have a good feel for what type of performance youll get out of todays high end hardware vs low to mid end hardware.
The slowness of his current rig is astounding. My mother runs Win7 on a 3GHz Pentium D with 1GB of DDR and it feels like corvette compared to his machine. I've done all the standard things like check for viruses and malware, ran memtest, and came up with nothing.

But if you think, an standard current dual core CPU would work like the i5 series, I'll go with that. But I'll move on to my main concern which is storage. Although his music collection is still technically backed up on CDs, the time spent ripping them to iTunes was extensive and is still not finished so a HDD failure would be catastrophic to say the least. Nobody wants to lose that much progress, and I can say that if it were me. I'd be looking at at some kind of RAID solution. RAID 10 is probably overkill but it would virtually eliminate the chances of complete data loss and you would have increased read/write speeds.
RAID 1 would be cheaper, and still rather effective as a means to prevent data loss, but you will have increased write speeds which would make the ripping process slower. I for one have only encountered 2 HDD failures in all of the systems that I have built for myself and other in the last 10 years, and one of the 2 happened to be a Maxtor, so based on my personal experience, I think the chances of both HDDs failing at the same time is pretty low and if one fails, you should have plenty of time to order a replacement and restore the array.

I would prefer the music stay on dedicated disks and the OS be installed on a separate smaller disk. SSDs have come down in price and are an excellent way to boost performance, but I suppose thats not entirely necessary and his current 1TB HDD is still fairly new and we could probably use that in the new build.

As for the cases, I'll definitely look at Antec just for the PSU.
 

DaveSimmons

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Aug 12, 2001
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Also set up the data drive with RAID-1 !! Re-ripping thousands of CDs would not be fun. If the budget allows, a good 60-80 GB SSD for the boot drive would speed up loading Windows, and would lower the noise a little when something like Outlook is writing files.

I'd go with something like an i5 slower quad-core, even the 2400 would be fine. I say this because that way all the background processes running are less likely to spike and cause a hiccup in the music playback thread.

8 GB of RAM makes sense because it's so cheap. There's no point to more than that.

Any decent $100 motherboard should have optical digital out for connecting to his receiver.
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
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RAID is not a backup! If some program accidentally or by design erases the drive, for instance, RAID won't help. I suggest an external drive, potentially a tape drive for backing up that much data.

I still see no reason for dedicated graphics on a new machine. 8GB is plenty for just about anything; even 4GB is quite sufficient, and the onboard graphics isn't going to take the entire other 4GB. Plus discrete cards can be loud.

Even the slowest Intel dual-core, which produces the least heat and thus can use the quietest cooling if you're worried about that, is much faster than his existing processor. But an SSD for the OS would definitely speed up his computer too, possibly much more than any processor upgrade. Have you measured whether his processor is maxed out (50% in Task Manager) when it's running slow? If not, the problem is more likely disk-related, and an SSD might be a good thing to try first.
 

DaveSimmons

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Of course it isn't. I thought of saying "as well as an external backup" but I took that for granted.

Most people are terrible about using their external drive to back up. Unless the friend is an exception, the RAID-1 setup will lower the odds of losing files.
 

richaron

Golden Member
Mar 27, 2012
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Seems he'll be fine with any of the mid range builds in this forum (minus gaming GPU ofc). Add another external drive & you're set.

If he's got money burning a hole in his pocket, I'm sure he can plow thousands into audio interface/speakers/headphones (which he'll notice a lot more than 30 seconds faster at ripping a cd).
 
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88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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RAID is not a backup! If some program accidentally or by design erases the drive, for instance, RAID won't help. I suggest an external drive, potentially a tape drive for backing up that much data.

I still see no reason for dedicated graphics on a new machine. 8GB is plenty for just about anything; even 4GB is quite sufficient, and the onboard graphics isn't going to take the entire other 4GB. Plus discrete cards can be loud.

Even the slowest Intel dual-core, which produces the least heat and thus can use the quietest cooling if you're worried about that, is much faster than his existing processor. But an SSD for the OS would definitely speed up his computer too, possibly much more than any processor upgrade. Have you measured whether his processor is maxed out (50% in Task Manager) when it's running slow? If not, the problem is more likely disk-related, and an SSD might be a good thing to try first.

Well, I know that RAID is not to serve as a back up, but I think it's extremely unlikely that someone would accidentally delete a mass amount of files like that. Whenever I install Windows on a new machine, I always the the extra step of disconnecting the storage drive(s) to avoid any chance of accidently formatting the wrong drive. And like I said, I haven't encountered too many instances of HDD failure in my systems or systems that Ive built for my friends to the past.

Right now his Memory usage is at 80% out between iTunes, Firefox, and a handful of other programs. iTunes is pushing a gig of ram in mem usage. (probably goes higher when its actualy in use), his CPU usage seems to hover around 35% which isn't too bad, but could be better.
His current HDD setup is a 300GB HDD for the OS, and a 1TB HDD for music storage so HDD hes currently running isn't jam packed with music files and should run the OS fine.

We could try a solid state drive, but I'm 99% sure that his board only supports SATA 1 which is only going to give you a fraction of SSD performance.

After we decide on a system, I'll probably look at some back up solutions.
 

DarkRogue

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Dec 25, 2007
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The thing about this thread that puzzles me is that the title is a build for an audiophile.. then you list "Decent 2.1ch sound card."

Are you sure this is for an audiophile, or just for a friend who likes listening to music?
I ask because I do have a friend who's an audiophile, and a "decent 2.1ch sound card" would drive him up a wall, lol.
He's spent about $2000 going through at least 4 different DACs just to find one he likes.
If he is a true audiophile, I'd suggest leaving the sound card to him, and actually he should avoid a soundcard (depending on the quality of his gear) and go for an external DAC/amp. If he only wants to listen to music, then a lower end Asus Xonar card would fit the bill nicely.

As far as his PC running slow, I'm sure it's a combination of the Athlon 64 and the 2GB of ram. Both are quite poor by today's standards. On the other hand, his load doesn't seem high enough that you need to go nuts. Any recent dual or quad core should suffice, just give him more than 2GB of RAM.

If you go with IVB or SB, onboard GPU would likely be fine for anything he wants to do, since he doesn't game.

The storage is a tough one. I rip my CD's to FLAC as well, so I know how much space they can take up. Only way around it is to throw more HDD's at it. RAID can help, but I think an external backup solution is best. If he accidentally deletes a directory, he still loses the files.

Unless he's ripping CD's every single day, a periodic backup to an external would serve him well. His music collection should remain static for a while before he rips another CD, usually. Just back up once to an external, then update the backup when he adds a new rip, or once a month or something. This prevents disasters from accidental deletions, a PSU blowing up, etc. Even if he loses data, he'd only lose a few rips as opposed to all of them.
 

Viper GTS

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Oct 13, 1999
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If he still has a lot of CDs left to rip consider building him a ripping machine.

My home desktop machine has 5x SATA DVD drives in it. Using dbpoweramp's batch ripper I can do ~100 discs an hour if they are clean and undamaged. That is 100 discs populated with metadata from a paid (read: good) metadata source, AccurateRip verified, and encoded in FLAC.

FLAC encoding is not particularly CPU intensive on a modern machine, focus on the ability to rip multiple CDs at once and reliable storage + backup.

Once I have the FLAC copy stored on my ripping machine I then move them into my long-term storage device. I maintain a side copy of the entire collection in 320k MP3 for portability, but I can re-encode those MP3's in a day or two any time I want. Only the FLAC gets backed up as that's where the real time is.

If he is ripping in iTunes consider educating him on proper rip technique. AccurateRip and FLAC (or other lossless of your choice) or don't bother. With the amount of time it takes to do a large collection getting it right the first time is critical.

Oh and DarkRogue is completely correct about the external DAC and AMP. He'll want to pick his own gear most likely.

Viper GTS
 

mfenn

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Well, I know that RAID is not to serve as a back up, but I think it's extremely unlikely that someone would accidentally delete a mass amount of files like that. Whenever I install Windows on a new machine, I always the the extra step of disconnecting the storage drive(s) to avoid any chance of accidently formatting the wrong drive. And like I said, I haven't encountered too many instances of HDD failure in my systems or systems that Ive built for my friends to the past.

As Ken mentioned, someone isn't the problem. The problem is something deleting, renaming, screwing up the tags, or otherwise wrecking the files.

The correct way to do it is to invest some of the budget into a real backup program like Acronis and set up an automated schedule that backs up the drive every night. Set it up to do a full backup every 2-3 weeks, incrementals every night, and keep the last couple months of backups. That way he can grab his old files from a few months back in case he doesn't notice the corruption immediately.

Right now his Memory usage is at 80% out between iTunes, Firefox, and a handful of other programs. iTunes is pushing a gig of ram in mem usage. (probably goes higher when its actualy in use), his CPU usage seems to hover around 35% which isn't too bad, but could be better.
His current HDD setup is a 300GB HDD for the OS, and a 1TB HDD for music storage so HDD hes currently running isn't jam packed with music files and should run the OS fine.

If you're so close to the edge in terms of memory usage that the extra 256MB or that an IGP uses makes a difference, that means you don't have enough RAM. 8GB on the new system is quite a lot though, so I think you'll be fine.

We could try a solid state drive, but I'm 99% sure that his board only supports SATA 1 which is only going to give you a fraction of SSD performance.

Not true. The benefit of an SSD has next to nothing to do with raw throughput and everything to do with low latency access. HDDs are actually quite fast in a completely sequential access mode, so when you really notice the HDD grinding away, that's indicative of a random access pattern. In random I/O the latency ("seek time") is way more important than raw throughput, so you're not going to be severely limited by even a SATA 1.5Gb/s link (think 80% or so of SATA 6Gb/s performance).
 

88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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The thing about this thread that puzzles me is that the title is a build for an audiophile.. then you list "Decent 2.1ch sound card."

Are you sure this is for an audiophile, or just for a friend who likes listening to music?
I ask because I do have a friend who's an audiophile, and a "decent 2.1ch sound card" would drive him up a wall, lol.
He's spent about $2000 going through at least 4 different DACs just to find one he likes.
If he is a true audiophile, I'd suggest leaving the sound card to him, and actually he should avoid a soundcard (depending on the quality of his gear) and go for an external DAC/amp. If he only wants to listen to music, then a lower end Asus Xonar card would fit the bill nicely.

That might not be a bad idea as I'm not an expert on soundcards and Ive generally made due with onboard sound in almost every rig Ive ever built.

However, my friend is one of those guys who only wants traditional stereo sound. no 5.1, 7.1 etc. He plays his music through an old solid state reciver... IIRC it's a pioneer sx-1980, and all I can say is that don't let its looks fool you lol....

And I doubt a 30+ year old reciever will have have SPDIF, or Optical Out lol.

I'm not sure if a ripping machine is what we need because he's done most of the ripping and after that, it will just be a CD here and there.

mfenn said:
As Ken mentioned, someone isn't the problem. The problem is something deleting, renaming, screwing up the tags, or otherwise wrecking the files.

The correct way to do it is to invest some of the budget into a real backup program like Acronis and set up an automated schedule that backs up the drive every night. Set it up to do a full backup every 2-3 weeks, incrementals every night, and keep the last couple months of backups. That way he can grab his old files from a few months back in case he doesn't notice the corruption immediately.
I understand that and we will be looking into a true back up solution. My idea would be perhaps to convert his old system into a NAS box and scheduling back ups using acronis. It would cost nothing more than an extra HDD, and maybe a WHS license.

So can anyone recommend a decent hardware RAID controller?
 

Ken g6

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Er, where's the motherboard? If you forgot that in the budget, I'd aim for:

ASRock B75, $60
i3-2120, $125

35% CPU means he's not CPU-limited, so I wouldn't worry about a quad-core.

Still with the RAID, I see. If the loss of a single day's work isn't too bad, a daily Synctoy run between the drives would be far more portable, not to mention free. (If the RAID controller breaks, you'd need a new one of the exact same type to read the drives' contents.)

The 128GB SSDs, in general, are a better value. $120 for an 830, or $110 for an M4.
 

88keys

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ive already gone over this with him and he seems very happy with the price ATM.
 

mfenn

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Still with the RAID, I see. If the loss of a single day's work isn't too bad, a daily Synctoy run between the drives would be far more portable, not to mention free. (If the RAID controller breaks, you'd need a new one of the exact same type to read the drives' contents.)

Agree on all points, especially this.

OP, any RAID controller that doesn't cost at least $200 doesn't have a hardware I/O processor onboard and is thus not any better than the mobo's RAID. They both use OS-level drivers to do all RAID processing.

The Intel RAID in this ASRock H77M has far better software support and compatibility (just need another Intel chipset) than the Silicon Image RAID in the card you selected.

I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but it's my obligation to keep mentioning it. RAID is for system availability (i.e. system uptime), backups are for data integrity. If you really insist on increasing the systems cost by using RAID, please include the cost of a true backup solution into the the total package that you present your friend. If he balks at the price, RAID should get cut before backups.

EDIT: Another point is that the Samsung HDDs that you picked out are very bad for RAID because they aggressively part their heads. That means that they occasionally take a little while (half a second or so) to recover from their light sleep state. That's too long for most RAID controllers and they will get dropped from the set. These Hitachi's work better.
 
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paperfist

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RAID is not a backup! If some program accidentally or by design erases the drive, for instance, RAID won't help. I suggest an external drive, potentially a tape drive for backing up that much data.

Thanks for posting that Wired link, it was a brutal read and an eye opener. I'm researching building a new rig for my business and was dead set on going RAID. I now know better. I mean besides knowing that if your RAID controller goes your kind of screwed anyway, now knowing the other nefarious angle makes me want to look in the direction of external backup.
 

88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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Agree on all points, especially this.

OP, any RAID controller that doesn't cost at least $200 doesn't have a hardware I/O processor onboard and is thus not any better than the mobo's RAID. They both use OS-level drivers to do all RAID processing.

The Intel RAID in this ASRock H77M has far better software support and compatibility (just need another Intel chipset) than the Silicon Image RAID in the card you selected.

I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but it's my obligation to keep mentioning it. RAID is for system availability (i.e. system uptime), backups are for data integrity. If you really insist on increasing the systems cost by using RAID, please include the cost of a true backup solution into the the total package that you present your friend. If he balks at the price, RAID should get cut before backups.

EDIT: Another point is that the Samsung HDDs that you picked out are very bad for RAID because they aggressively part their heads. That means that they occasionally take a little while (half a second or so) to recover from their light sleep state. That's too long for most RAID controllers and they will get dropped from the set. These Hitachi's work better.
Than I suppose a better solution would be to just set both hard drives up seperately as non raid, have one 2 TB HDD used as the main, an dthe other used for back up.


Or I can just ditch the raid card, and buy another PSU and set up an NAS box. Or I can buy an external enclosere which would be cheaper yet.

He's still undecided on the i5 vs the i3. He likes the price, but he's also happy with saving $125 on the price difference. This machine should be pretty capable with a 74GB or 178GB SSD either way. And I could be wrong, but I don't think there is alot of software available that it optimized for quad core systems. iTunes could be however.

will be back with a new build revision shortly

As for the HDDs, would it be ok to use the Samsungs if not using a RAID array?
 
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88keys

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Aug 24, 2012
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Revised Pending Build:

Antec Mid Tower Case

2x WD AV-GP 2TB HDDs


8GB Gskill PC3 10666

Core i3 2320 3.3GHz

Samsung 830 128GB SSD

ASROCK B75M


Upgraded the SSD, downgraded the CPU and opted for slightly better HDDs from Western Digital

Turns out the Samsungs were on sale for $99 yesterday and I thought that was regular price... derp. But it's not a huge deal as these WDs should perform slightly better for a little extra $$$. And I may look around amazon and other vendors as I have often found better prices on HDDs than what newegg. has to offer.

The end result of the i3 vs the i5 is about a $60 price difference. Either way that keeps us under the $700 mark.
 

Zap

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Oct 13, 1999
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I'm a bit late to this party because, well, I was out partying and dancing last two nights...

So, here is my take on all that has transpired. Some is reiterating and reinforcing what others have said, or beating on more dead horses. Otherwise, these are my opinions on a possible build.

1) Based on your description, this guy is not an audiophile. Sure he enjoys the heck out of music, but an audiophile would not be using iTunes on an old computer.

2) To reiterate, RAID is not a backup. RAID is for availability or performance, neither of which is needed for storing and playing back music. A backup, however, is needed so factor that into your costs. A backup is a physically separate copy of the data. One easy method is to periodically copy the music collection onto an external HDD.

3) Even the slowest Core i3 will be worlds faster than an old socket 939 dual core.

4)
I havent built a high end system since the socket 939 days
Perfect. Please toss out all that you know and start from scratch. I say that partially in jest, but partially serious. AMD is no longer the CPU king. SSDs have IMO surpassed HDDs except for capacity/cost. No more need for huge towers, or even mid-sized towers. One more point to make. Integrated graphics is better than your old discrete graphics, and indeed has improved so much recently that unless you actually need to use more than 2 displays or need some sort of 3D graphics acceleration such as gaming or engineering (or misc other stuff like OpenCL), there is pretty much no point left in a discrete graphics card. Using up some RAM? Seriously? With RAM being so cheap most people have more than they could possibly use.

5) This is what I would build, were I in your situation, and the reasons why I would choose them.

CPU: Pentium G860 $90
Unless they've updated it, I don't think iTunes supports Intel QuickSync or even multiple threads. More MHz is better, but by mere seconds for an entire album.

CPU COOLER: Stock
Just make sure to enable a silent fan profile in BIOS.

MOTHERBOARD : ASRock H77M $70
Slightly better chipset, slightly better onboard audio with more ports such as SPDIF output.

RAM: Samsung 8GB kit $47
This is arguably the best 8GB dual channel DDR3 kit that money can buy, for a few bucks less.

GRAPHICS: Integrated
For the stated uses, absolutely no value in anything discrete.

SSD : cheapest non-crappy 120/128GB for under $100
Too many deals almost daily on SSDs. Don't get hung up on a single brand/model because a number of them are decent. Also, don't get too hung up over buying everything from Newegg. Sometimes Amazon has better prices. Heck, sometimes Staples has better prices!!! Just look for a SATA 6G drive (often inaccurately marketed as SATA III) and almost any drive will suffice. Exceptions (do not buy!) are drives such as the OCZ Octane/Petrol, or the Kingston V200 (but V+200 is okay - note that + in the model!!!).

HDD : WD AV-GP 2TB $125
I guess it is a cheap way to get a 3 year warranty.

OPTICAL DRIVE: whatever SATA model floats your boat
Seriously, they are pretty much disposable.

BACKUP: LaCie Minimus 2TB USB 3.0 $145
Tough choice because there are so many on the market so I settled on this one for these reasons. 1) 3 year warranty when most have only a year. 2) Sits horizontal on desk, because external drives that stand vertically like the WD MyBook are just asking to fall over and kill themselves. 3) 2TB to match capacity of drive being backed up. 4) USB 3.0 so it is universal. 5) Nice minimalistic looking aluminum, not some glossy fingerprint magnet cheap plastic like the WD MyBook. Another option is the Seagate Expansion 3TB for even cheaper, but it only comes with a 1 year warranty.

CASE: Fractal Design Define Mini $110
This case is designed for minimal noise, has reasonable airflow (always at odds with noise) and supports six HDDs like the Antec 300. Speaking of, the 300 is a noisy wind tunnel in comparison. No high end graphics card and massive overclocking? No need for that wind tunnel.

PSU: SeaSonic 360W 80Plus Gold $70
Alternately: SeaSonic 300W 80Plus Bronze $49
Quiet, good quality, efficient, inexpensive. What's not to like? Well, except for the fact that no company makes such a PSU with a fraction of the output. Seriously though, an Intel dual core socket 1155 CPU with one HDD and one SSD running integrated graphics will probably NEVER draw more than around 80W from the wall fully loaded, and will probably idle under 40W.

Total cost $700-800 depending on deals (especially on SSD) and PSU choice.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
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CPU: Pentium G860 $90
Unless they've updated it, I don't think iTunes supports Intel QuickSync or even multiple threads. More MHz is better, but by mere seconds for an entire album.
Quicksync or similar is not needed, or even remotely useful. The bulk of the time is handling the disc itself, not the encoding, especially with lossless formats. But, why not just get a i3 for so little extra?

HDD : WD AV-GP 2TB $125
I guess it is a cheap way to get a 3 year warranty.
It's a PC, not a DVR. One hard to read sector and he's going to have to hit the backups. Same goes for Seagate SV35, IIRC. I wouldn't do it. With a SSD for the OS, a green drive would be fine, but I would avoid the AV drives.

OPTICAL DRIVE: whatever SATA model floats your boat
Seriously, they are pretty much disposable.
They are not interchangeable, though, frustratingly. Even today, there are significant differences, due to controller chip, at how good they are for detecting and correcting errors on CDs. My old Sammy is still kicking, so I can't point to a good ripping brand new drive, but a little research should find some good ones. CDRlabs and MyCE are still good places to read and ask.
 
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88keys

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He checked his card balance today and it turns out that he has a little more $$ to burn than he originally thought so here's the new yet again revised build geared more toward performance...


Antec New Solution Desktop Case

2x WD Caviar Green HDDs


16GB DDR3 GSKill

Core i5 3550 3.3GHz

Samsung 830 128GB SSD

ASROCK B75M


LACiE 2TB Ext HDD


ASUS Xonar Essence Sound Card

A friend of mine who works for Guitar Center recommended the sound card which is $200.
For everything else, I just went with my best judgement was was told to stay under $1200, so the new grand total is $1194 shipped lol....
Anyway, the new set up will be to run 2TB HDDs in RAID 0 for the slight performance gain and use the ext HDD as a back up. Probably gonna part out his old system on eBay and I think we'll get at least $80 for it which we'll use to buy a BDR.


I figure this rig will serve him quite well for several years This now marks the first time I've ever built a PC for a friend that is superior to my own let alone far far superior. Last time I spent this much on a PC was back when socket 939 was new and the CPUs were $400.

BTW, Im running a Core i3 530 @ 2.93GHz with 8GB of DDR3 on an nVidia 9800GT which was a budget buster 2 years ago when I built it lol
 
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Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
Moderator
Dec 11, 1999
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Anyway, the new set up will be to run 2TB HDDs in RAID 0 for the slight performance gain and use the ext HDD as a back up.
2x WD Caviar Green HDDs
You undid the performance gain by getting two "green" HDDs. Furthermore, in RAID 0, you'd have 4TB in the computer, with just 2TB external backup. And I don't think that board provides RAID anyway; see the H77 Mfenn linked for that.

In any case, I didn't see mention of any software being used that would require performance over what any single drive can give. Is he doing anything else on this box besides music-related apps?

Edit: Also, IMHO, if he has a "card balance", he doesn't have "$$ to burn". And the quad-core and 16GB RAM just look like wasted money to me. But I won't know that for sure until I know if he's doing anything besides iTunes-like stuff.
 
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DarkRogue

Golden Member
Dec 25, 2007
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Just because you got additional funds does NOT mean you should spend it!

Get something that suits his usage and stay there!
It happens very often, and when it's not your own money, it's tempting to just recommend up to the max.

Green drives are for power saving, and honestly, I'm not sure if WD ever corrected the excessive head parking problem on those drives. I have a couple Green drives, but they are strictly my external backup drives. If you run them 24/7 in a PC, the head parking may pose a problem, depending on how often he accesses the drives.

RAID0 also goes against your "backup" plan, because if either drive fails, everything goes down with it. As said, you'd also have a 4TB partition being backed up onto a 2TB drive. Size mismatch.

Ask your friend what exactly he does on his PC. If it only consists of him browsing the web and ripping CDs (to what? MP3? FLAC? Both?) then you don't need very much. Even 16GB is unnecessary, unless he's processing photos on the side.

As far as the AV drive recommendation, while this isn't an HTPC, my understanding of those drives is that they're supposed to be rated for a higher MTBF. Useful for more critical data, I suppose. I just go with a couple of low-cost Blues in my system, and back them up onto Greens every once in a while.

IMO, while I don't have specific parts to recommend, I can say drop the ram down to save some money; 8GB is enough. Stick with one or two non-RAIDed HDD's internally for data, put the apps on the SSD. Invest more of your "new cash" into a backup solution. NAS box, more HDD's for redundancy, etc. I personally go with 2 external enclosures. I just swap drives back and forth between them for backups.

As far as the sound card goes - the Xonar Essence is a very good internal card, and supports opamp rolling, I believe. The problem again, is what level of audiophile is he?
ViperGTS broguht up a point I missed - He's using iTunes to rip his CD's?
Is he ripping to ALAC at least? Or just AAC / MP3 / M4A?

The reason is that the Xonar Essence, while being a very good card for an internal soundcard, is still geared toward the more critical listeners. It can bring out flaws on a poor/lossy compression format, and/or actually sound worse than a less forgiving DAC. It's also possible that he simply won't be able to hear the difference, in which case a lower end card will be just fine.

The other side is, if he really can discern the differences, I'd stay away from recommending any internal cards unless absolutely necessary. The inside of a computer is extremely noisy, which will impact the ability of audio signals to run through the DAC without interference. This is why you'd usually go with an external DAC and perhaps a separate amp as well.

Personally, my budget didn't allow for a very fancy DAC, so I use an AudioFire4 hooked up to a Matrix M-stage amp, powering either a Sennheiser HD-600, or an Audio-Technica W1000X depending on my mood. I swapped back to my onboard Realtek once and it was garbage, lol.

*EDIT
Doesn't he already have an optical drive for ripping? Why buy another one?
In either case, try and make sure he rips to lossless, and hits the AccurateRip database to verify his rips. Part of this I believe requires finding the optical drive's offset. It'd be easier if he's already set it up on his older drive, though I believe there are a few sites now that catalog the offsets of various drives if he wants to get a new one. Still, if it's going to be a CD ripping drive, hit MyCE (used to be CDFreaks.com) and look up the various error correction capabilities of the drives you want to look at.
 
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