Cheap, but long lasting

[quickshot89]

Need a cheap, but powerful enough for plex, ps3 media server, torrenting kind of box.

Needs CPU, MOBO, RAM, CASE, PSU.

Already have the hard drives so these arnt an issue. Would prefer a mobo with 6 sata but 4 will be at a minimum. Dont need optical either on this.

This needs to keep going for 2 years at least if it helps. As cheap as possible though.

Cheers

 

[JonJ678]

Well, I'm using a HP microserver as a media server. No load problems, despite running zfs. Plex appears to be a dlna server and client. You can run rtorrent on just about anything - the 400MHz pentium something I had over a decade ago was overkill for it. Previously I used a PPC chip that came attached to a western digital hard drive for server media / website / torrent client / backups.

You don't really need a "computer". An embedded board plugged into a hard drive would be quick enough. If you're willing to play with open source, choose pretty much any box you like. Or dig though the spare parts box you've probably accumulated, or look at MM and buy whatever is cheapest.

If you're using windows server, no double it'll need a graphics card and something newer than a core 2 duo in order to fight off viruses and whatever else windows does to amuse itself.