|
|
回復 qwe456
Haha, c-hing, Since I am not familiar on PC fabrication, I may choose to buy a M ...
edhuen 發表於 2011-4-21 11:59 
Ok, here are my two cents:
1. Don't buy unnecessary components, boards of all sorts, etc.
2. Don't get processors/ components that generate too much heat -- otherwise you might need big heat sinks, etc.
3. Don't need the machine to be terribly powerful, it's not like you need a lot of processing power.
4. Don't want to have internal power supply if possible.
Solutions:
1. Get an Atom motherboard. Pick one that uses an external power supply. There aren't too many choices, but I managed to find one with onboard wireless as well. You can go without a fan at all with that, but I did install a super quiet 7cm fan to keep the temperature at around 40C (totally optional). Also, get an aluminum case to help with heat dissipation.
2. Get a small SSD and store your music files elsewhere (on another machine in another room in my case). I got a cheap 32GB SSD. Again, I don't need it to be terribly fast, so I just picked a cheap one, as long as it works. Since I already have >4TB of storage across the machines in my house, I don't need need a big hard drive that generates heat + noise in the box attached to my stereo. Oh, and do yourself a favor, don't install a CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive!
3. Install as much RAM as possible to remove any bottleneck from the lack of RAM (4GB for 32-bit). I installed two bars of 2GB DDR2.
4. Make sure you have a fast network within your home (your home network, not your up-link to your ISP) since you will be streaming big audio files (FLAC). I have a gigabit network with Cat6 cables running into every room, including the locations where the computers are. But for various reasons, I chose to use wireless for this particular box.
4. Don't attach a monitor to the box. You don't need more circuits around your stereo, but more importantly, you will be sitting too far away from the monitor to read the text on-screen! What I ended up doing was accessing the machine using remote desktop over wireless from a laptop when I need to start foobar2000 to play some music. There's also a HTTP control plug-in for foobar2000, but I haven't tried it.
5. Use Windows 7 (32-bit) or your favorite Linux distro if you prefer, don't go for Vista/XP. I went with Windows on this box. Since there isn't an optical disc drive in the box, install your OS using a USB thumb drive.
There were compromises I made along the way, e.g. putting the box on the network instead of having a big SSD, using wireless instead of plugging in a Cat 6 cable, etc. But for practical reasons, I consider most of these reasonable trade-offs. All-in hardware cost was ~HK$2000, if I remember correctly. And this was last month.
And yes, I spent more time typing this up than putting the box together! Hope this helps and have fun! |
|
[複製鏈接]
樓主
發表於 2011-4-21 01:35
