[wnewport]

I am planning on building a new desktop for Christmas and need some advice. I want a computer that can fit neatly on top of my amp. Its sole purpose would be to play, rip, and burn cds and dvds - the quicker the better. I don't need a video card, sound card, monitor, or hard drive. Silence, or near silence, is also very important to me.

So basically I need a case, mobo, possible psu (a lot of the home theater cases come with power supplies), cpu, and ram.

I can get Vista Ultimate for 80 bucks from my school, so if the Service Pack does well, then I will probably go that route for an OS.

So far I have not seen a huge benefit with dual core procs with audio and video extraction. For this reason I am considering a budget single core AM2 processor until their new lineup comes out.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Make absolutely sure that your power supply has sufficient amperage to run your mobo. I've smoked a mobo before from not having enough amperage capacity in the power supply.

If you're going to run Vista, get plenty of ram, Vista is a memory hog and also wants a fairly power processor to run at a decent speed. Personally I wouldn't run Vista unless I had any other choice. There is enough spyware running around the intertubes without having your OS spy on you as well.

""I don't need a video card, sound card, monitor, or hard drive.""

Do you mean you already have all these things?

If you use IDE DVD burners, make sure that you have each of them on a separate IDE controller. You can use a hard drive as the master and the burner as a slave.

If you are going to be using the burners a lot then do some research to find out which ones are the most reliable. I've worn out several CD and DVD burners, they get steadily less reliable over time. Test them from time to time with a rewritable disk since they are more difficult both to burn and to read.

One possible advantage to a dual core processor in your application is that you could rip two or more CD/DVD disks at the same time.

I have a Pentium D 805 which is a dual core 2.66 ghz processor that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. So far I'm very pleased with it.

If you want to save yourself the effort of reripping everything in case of a hard drive crash it would probably be best to run a RAID 0 setup with two identical drives.

 

[Drewpy]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif If you want to save yourself the effort of reripping everything in case of a hard drive crash it would probably be best to run a RAID 0 setup with two identical drives.

That would be RAID 1 if you want to have fault tolerant data storage.