im thinking of building one myself at some stage.

a few things that im considering

1) ill probably get a motherboard with integrated graphics. absolute tosh for performance i know, but its not going to be playing games.

2) try and passively cool everythign as much as possible and use big-ish quite fans to cool everything else. if i want it on 24/7 a near silent server is important.

3) some sort of redundency is very important....especially if ure storing important things like family photos and videos. personally im going to have 2 hard drives in a mirror raid configuration (raid 1 i think its called). this will mean that if one hard drive fails, i will still have my data intact. its not 100% reliable (its possibel that both HDDs could fail) but its better than just one HDD.

4) the CPU doesent need to be top end. personally im looking at low-mid end core 2 duos as they dont run hot, there cheaper and theyll get the job done. it also meant that i can get a quieter cooler for them.

5) im thinking 2GB of ram myself. if everyone start streaming data around the house at the same time then that ram will come in handy.

6) as for the OS, personally im going to get a version of linux and set up my own server. i want to learn alot about linux and this is a great excuse :P. the OS is also free which is nice and its very relaible. chances are im going to muck up the OS about 50 times before i get everythign up and running though but thats half the fun :P. if ure not interested in linux at all then windows media home server has been released recently. its OEM only mind but u can get an OEM copy from many retailers. just make sure the hardware ure choosing will work with it. from what ive seen, it looks pretty good and simple to get up and running.

osan0

You seem to have put a lot of thought into it. I was going with 1 gig but I think you make a very good point and I will either go with 2 or 2.5 gigs. I also was going to do the 2 hard drive configuration, not RAID though, RAID gets very expensive. I was going with 2 1TB hard drives, I think SATA would be fine. As for the CPU, I really didn't want to go with a multi core chip because if all of them are like the one I have the performance isn't that great, plus a nice AMD chip that isn't multi core shouldn't be too expensive. I also was going with on board video, this server will do nothing but hold the files and stream them that's it. The OS I am not all that worried about, I believe any OS will do, but I will check out the Windows Media Home Server and see how that might fair. I am trying to keep this little project under a grand if at all possible.

It's just a streaming machine, i think liquid cooling will be overkill.... unless your hiding it in a corner enclosed in a cupboard and you have money to burn on it.

What software you using to stream? Can i sugguest Linux MCE

Realmkiller

Actually the media will be streamed from the server to a PS3. As for the server, I actually was just going to go with Windows XP, I know next to nothing about Linux, besides the couple of weeks in college when I was experimenting with it. I figured liquid cooling might be over kill but I thought since the server will be running non stop then I might suggest it, the cheaper I can make this the better.

Sorry, I posted this in the General Hardware forum, I knew this one existed but couldn't find it for some reason

I kind of know what I want to build but I just want a little feedback from others before I start. Alright, I am building a media server to put music, family videos, pictures and maybe a few other things so that I can stream them anywhere in the house, well anywhere there is a TV. I already have the hard drive I want to get but was looking into CPU and the amount of RAM and what not. I really want to go with an AMD but I think it really boils down to which would perform better. I also was thinking of going with 1 gig of RAM since this is only a server not a PC that everyone will be using. Another question is, would a simple fan setup do or should I consider liquid cooling? Any feedback is greatly appreciated.