Theoretically, the demands on a system designed to play music should not be that high. I had been running Winamp with the SqrSoft Advanced Crossfading plug-in under Windows XP on a Celeron 300A system with only 256MB RAM, which was well below the minimum requirements for Winamp. It ran for many years with no problems. Although there were times when it was so slow to get going you would swear the thing was dead, it generally managed to do the job!
On the other hand, I wanted to "future proof" the system against newer operating systems, so I didn't want to shoot too low. Running HD video or one of the awesome Geiss visualisation plugins efficiently starts to put demands on the system and this was out of the question on my old computer.
I was also concerned about power consumption, since this machine would be running for long periods of time. I thought about mobile computer technology but decided against it, since it would be harder to upgrade and more expensive in the long run. The following decisions were made around July, 2009.
The Components
For this application, I figured that a quad core processor was less important. I carefully looked at the specs versus price at the time and ended up choosing an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz processor with a 6MB cache and 1333MHz FSB. Not the fastest processor on the planet, but still very good performance for the price at the time. Maximum power consumption is 65W. Many other current processors use up to double this. Nevertheless, 65W is a lot of heat to dissipate from one chip and the size of the heatsink and fan that comes with it says it all! The E8400 was amongst the first to feature VRD 11.1 technology to reduce power consumption during normal operation.
I have wasted way too much time in the past trying to solve quirky problems on non-Intel chipset systems. I chose the Intel P31 Express chipset after discovering that DDR-3 or higher speed DDR-2 RAM supported by some of the more up-market chipsets was either too expensive or not yet available. The P31 Express chipset supports a Core 2 Duo processor with up to 1333MHz FSB. It only supports 4GB of RAM, but this is adequate for this application. The power consumption of the P31 Express chipset is lower than some of the more up-market chipsets.
The RAM is Corsair 4 GB TWIN2X4096-6400C5DHX 800MHz PC6400 DDR2 (two modules). The heat dissipated by RAM has often been overlooked in the past. These modules are fitted with heatsinks. I have never before seen someone go to the trouble of making their RAM look so cool!
I chose a GigaByte motherboard because over the years I have found these to be the most reliable. One reason for this is that they have always used high quality capacitors. I have seen many other brand motherboards fail due to capacitors. I chose the GigaByte GA-EP31-DS3L, which has a reduced form factor that will fit in the cabinet. It supports VDR 11.1 with LED indicators and has 3 older PCI slots as well as 3 PCIe slots. This board does not support RAID, but for my requirements, this was not important and I did not want to have multiple hard drives to increase the noise level and power consumption.
A good graphics card can make a big difference to the overall performance of a system, even when you are not gaming. I needed at least two outputs - one for the internal monitor and one for a big screen, with support for playing HD video. For these reasons, I decided against an integrated graphics chipset solution. I chose a GigaByte GV-N95TOC-512I, with an nVidia 9500GT chipset, 512MB DDR-2 RAM, an HDMI connector, DVI-I connector and a D-Sub connector with various output combination options by using adaptors. It has a composite, S-video or component video input. This GigaByte implementation uses high quality capacitors.
