Building a Media/ Encoding Rig

cdbob

cdbob

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I am in the process of choosing the components for my first build.

My goals are the to have a system designed for encoding, media playback and downloading.

I'm thinking of:

2-3 2TB WD Green HDDs

Athlon II 635 Quad Core

Antec 500 Watt 80+ PSU

An ATI 5650 GPU

I'm looking for a balance of: value for money, speed and something that doesn't burn through power.
 
Well, depending on how much, and what kind of, encoding you're planning on doing, you might not need that much CPU power, and again, depending on the decoding you're planning on doing, the GPU might be overkill. I use dual-core 1.6Ghz Atom with Nvidia ION to run my htpc, and it works like a champ, 1080p and all. The whole thing uses about 35-40 watts. There's no way it could do anything like realtime HD encoding though, so if I wanted to encode on it I would definitely be limited to what could run overnight. If you want to be able to record multiple simultaneous TV shows (with transcoding), the rig you mention is probably about right, except that I would throw the 2TB drives into a raid 0 or 5, and then get a couple of smaller system drives (I always use raid1 for system drives), so your regular OS usage doesn't interfere with your recording/playing.


Edit: I said this in IRC, but it might as well go here:
"so cdbob, I guess if power, noise and heat are super important, consider an atom, especially since you're just doing FLAC encoding. The i3 can probably be made just as quiet quite easily, but it will draw more power and require more sophisticated cooling. The other advantage of an i3 is that you have your choice of motherboard, which is good if you need multiple expansion slots. Most atom motherboards are itx"
 
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I agree, an Atom rig with the Nvidia Ion chip would make a good media machine and unless you're counting the seconds encoding will be fine. Just make sure you back up your data, my NAS drive died last year and I lost ~700GB of downloaded data. I don't trust RAID mirroring to do a good job of that either. :)
 
If you're doing some proper encoding then the last cpu I'd want is a 1.6ghz single core atom. Encoding x264 with my 3.8ghz i7 is already painfully slow at 60-80fps, and I reckon an atom cpu is going to get around 15fps.
 
Matt2000 said:
I agree, an Atom rig with the Nvidia Ion chip would make a good media machine and unless you're counting the seconds encoding will be fine. Just make sure you back up your data, my NAS drive died last year and I lost ~700GB of downloaded data. I don't trust RAID mirroring to do a good job of that either. :)
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I have decided that things like media files are not worth the effort to back up, but I do keep them on a RAID5 array so that I can lose one drive without any lost data. I can always rip/download it all again.

Cold Fussion said:
If you're doing some proper encoding then the last cpu I'd want is a 1.6ghz single core atom. Encoding x264 with my 3.8ghz i7 is already painfully slow at 60-80fps, and I reckon an atom cpu is going to get around 15fps.
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I agree, if we're talking about high-quality video encoding, and atom would be unbearable, not to mention that it would be crap at multitasking while it was doing it. However, in this case, we were talking about FLAC audio only (as per an IRC discussion), so a dual-core atom would be plenty ( encode in < 8 seconds for a 4 min song). If power usage and silence aren't as much of a concern (and again, the silence thing can be worked around with fancy heatsinks on the CPU), an i3/i5 or an AMD might well be better. I don't really know what is out there right now though, as it's been quite a while since I priced desktop parts.
 
I would get the quad core AMD if you're gaming. However, the six core will do much better for encoding. If you're just doing audio encoding then the processor isn't a big deal. But trust me, any proper video encoding, even SD, get a six core AMD or a Core i7 at least.
 
Polygon said:
I would get the quad core AMD if you're gaming. However, the six core will do much better for encoding. If you're just doing audio encoding then the processor isn't a big deal. But trust me, any proper video encoding, even SD, get a six core AMD or a Core i7 at least.
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Actually it largely depends on the software he will be using, for instance format factory is not taking much advantage of even my dual core :(
 
On the other hand, as far as I know ffmpeg will use all cores.
 
cdbob said:
I am in the process of choosing the components for my first build.

My goals are the to have a system designed for encoding, media playback and downloading.

I'm thinking of:

2-3 2TB WD Green HDDs

Athlon II 635 Quad Core

Antec 500 Watt 80+ PSU

An ATI 5650 GPU

I'm looking for a balance of: value for money, speed and something that doesn't burn through power.
Click to expand...

This is good if you're looking to also do a little bit of gaming or other graphics intensive programs. If not, then go with a more powerful CPU and use the onboard GPU. If you get the Phenom II X6 1055T you can encode faster and your rig will use about the same about of total power. But of course if you're gaming then the graphic side is not going to cut it.
 
Update: While I didn't get a rig, I did get an encoding machine. An MSI wind came my way, so I decided I would deck it out a bit to turn into a dl/ encoding machine. I overclocked the processor to 2.0 GHZ and added 1GB of additional ram. While it's not as powerful as a desktop, it's not too bad.

Thanks to everyone for all your advice and suggestions, I will keep them in mind when the wind dies.
 
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