The more I read about the recommended parts, I realize you guys are serious about performance. Is that really necessary to run a SB server?? I don't need a gaming machine. I think this is too much power and money. I was originally intrigued by the small size and low cost of Nicks first post about the little Intel micro board with Celeron.
My 6yo Dell 2400 has 2.6GHz P4 and has enough power, if it weren't also doing my power user activities and sharing profiles with other people. Amazing it has held up. With 100+ apps installed the registry is enormous. It is not optimized for SC at all, hence the problems.
The Infrant NAS is lightning fast file server, and either mediocre or just plain sucks at everything else. The processor is designed for fileserving and those specs are great. I will use it to hold music files and forego a separate disk array in the SB server. It is 750GB Raid 5 right now, no point replacing it. Using Nicks dedicated Linux server with SC7 is plenty fast enough with less than half second response. A modern dual core processor would make it even faster as would a better network switch to get this SB system off the consumer router. I can always put more storage into the SB server if that becomes an issue, but I would like to try the NAS for storage with a dedicated faster host first.
I will run Sonar and recording software on a laptop and only playback masters through the SB, so big memory is not required either, 2G should be plenty to start, and harmless to add more. I want to put the money into the laptop where the processing power and reliability will be needed.
Running plugins on SB is the only fly in my "less is more" ointment. That will require significant processing power, but running under Linux and running nothing else at all but SC should still be enough with a modern dual core and fast buss. I ran Inguz EQ on the Dell with no problem. But Inguz works on WAVs, so the machine needs to decode flac locally, then process the plugin, while maintaining decent nav response. These are the kind of things I would like to understand before I buy. To buy enough power, but not 2x more than I will ever need.
I know I need a new machine for this, always on, dedicated audio server, with enough speed to minimize SB navigation delay. So I gotta get something. This isn't a wet blanket, just a more focused engineering specification.
I want to reference the price of the build to that of a finished system. An HP with AMD x2 is only $600. Seems like we can DIY with better value than that?? How bout least expensive way to run AMD Athlon x2 in Carls quiet box? A single small Seagate Barracuda for OS and apps. 2GB ram, no video. I think that's all I really need to start. That solves my immediate problem and allows improvement if needed.
Please point out the flaws in my thinking!!!
Thanks
Rich