[ou_phidelt]

Last year I parted out my matx Q6600 build. Everything sold fine but I could not get rid of the case. So the though hit me it would make an excellent server. Great air flow with room for 10 hard drives. The box would be serving to notebooks and two TV's. First priority is the build had to be cheap.

First the motherboard. I went with a Foxconn 780G. First it is a brand I trust with a good chiset and six SATA ports. The board layout makes it simple enough to add additional room.

Second was a PSU. Found a brand new OCZ 500W for $40 in the classie of another forum. Complete overkill but cheap and reliable.

Now we need a CPU. Newegg had the Sparta E-1150's for $20. For the purpose of serving its more than enough power.

I pulled a 2x512MB of PC533 out of an old Dell build for the memory.

HD's will be two Seagate 1.5TB's(fingers crossed)

Windows Home Server was the selected OS.

The install was a breeze. Install the software and on the client PC's and she's done. Now it a headless box that sits in the corner of the living room.

Now for actual use: it streams music very easily, back-ups the PC's perfectly(though I have never tried a restore from these back-up.)

The video part of the streaming has been a complete nightmare. It seems not matter what program or codec's it fuses about them. But I finally found autoGK, works but is very very very limiting in what you can do. But the problem of my current collection exists, they still won't play. At this point my time started getting short and I gave up on video.

Fast foward a couple months and my Wife buys me a PS3 to go with the new 46" Sony LCD in the bedroom(don't get you hopes up as she bought it for herself to watch the Twilight special on BR).

This lead me to discover PS3mediaserver. Holy crap what a wonderful piece of software. There really is no set up other than telling where the files are. As an added bonus it works for the 360 as well. It will also start as a service so it will automatically start up when the system does. Very handy for a headless system that doesn't get logged into when it is re-started.

New problem. The trusty 'ol sparta doesn't have the juice to transcode HD video. Not a surprise but I hadn't intended on this function.

Out with the old and in with a 5050e aling with a Xigmatek to quiet down the stock cooler. Same 45TDU so hopefullly the power use remains the same. I just did a test stream of 1080P over wireless in the bedroom and it worked great. Then sat down and enjoyed a streamed episode of Southland in 720P in the livingroom.

I took 6 months but I am finally happy with the project.

[Twigglish]

Sounds great man. I was contemplating turning one of my old cases(and spare hardware) into a server as well. I'm sure I will, I just don't know when.

[JonSimonzi]

I love it when a plan comes together.

[chuck4456]

Yeah.
If you need a server it's great.

[GBH]

I want that capability =/