Help Speccing a PC Please

timmyt · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:18

Hello I need your expert help. I have finally decided to help my Dad back up his CD collection which is huge close to or more than 4000 CD's. What i need is a small PC that is not very loud enough space for a few HDD's. Has to be powerful enough to rip loss less in a decent amount of time which isn't much. I only need a PC i have OS and Monitor. Also need a very good quality CD/DVD drive as quality is everything.
Thanks

wilko49 · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:23

there is very little quality difference between CD/DVD drives, have you considered Blu-ray though? If playback quality is a requirement, you need a good soundcard, but if it is just for storing backups, its not a problem.

timmyt · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:26

This machine will only be used for back ups and maybe surfing the web thats it i dont think a Blu-ray drive will be needed just a good quality drive that has very little errors.

cmndr_andi · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:38

How does this look?

+ 2x1GB DDR3 RAM = £50 inc. delivery

Total Price = £310

That system should do all you need of it.

The DVD drive reads CDs at 48x speed, which should be fast enough.

The Hard Disk is not the fastest, but it should be quick enough for these uses. Also, it is great value, massive in capacity and very cool & quiet.

The motherboard has onboard graphics, they aren't amazing, but will be fine for desktop uses and will happily decode DVD video in hardware. Also, the motherboard has 6 SATA ports, so you could add another 4 drives to it if you felt the need.

If you find the stock cooler on the Athlon II a bit noisy - this would be an excellent replacement.

wilko49 · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:39

In that case, you only need basic kit. As I said, there is no quality difference between disc drives, other than write speed. A disc drive that returns ANY errors is faulty.

Reading optical media is 100% digital, thus virtually error-proof. It's only during play-back that sound starts being turned into analogue, which is when it can lose quality.

An Athlon X2 build would do fine for this, for example the "Primo Drone" bundle.
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-265-OK&groupid=43&catid=1078&subcat=

with an extra 1TB Samsung F3 for storage, and a couple of extra fans (Noctua fans are supposed to be almost silent, Akasa Apaches are also supposed to be very good)

Mason- · 2 Jul 2010 at 00:40

Well you could always get more than 1 drive. Can burn + read loads at the same time.

timmyt · 2 Jul 2010 at 01:28

Will only need 1 DVD drive but probally more than 2TB worth of space. Is there anyway of getting the price down abit. perhaps to under 300.
i was thinking about http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-265-OK&tool=3 will it do the job?

cmndr_andi · 2 Jul 2010 at 01:35

Is there anyway of getting the price down abit. perhaps to under 300.

You could go for my above spec, but use this motherboard instead and DDR2 RAM (you could probably even get away with 1GB of RAM).

You could take the budget down even further and get an intel Atom board (and a minITX case and PSU), but the performance would be MUCH worse and there would not be many extra SATA ports for future expandability.