- 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.
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?
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