i3 4130T or 4130 for file/media server?

[Nezbert]

The guys at FreeNAS forum rave on about Supermicro boards for servers, coupled with a low power Intel CPU. The boards can be pretty expensive but I was watching an older model on eBay that went for around £15. I wished I'd snapped that one up at the time.

[watercooled]

The thing is, some older server boards aren't exactly low-power which might be worth taking into consideration for a home system. Plus, you'd have to check if they're ATX or if you'd need a case to go with them.

[probedb]

Well I got the 4130T and with a Noctua NH-L9i it's lovely and quiet, cool and is still faster than the Q6600 that came out of it. I think I was due an update

[silent]

Personally, I'd go with an AM1 setup, running a quad core Sempron 3850, with an matx board. These generally have a physical X16/electrical X4 slot, and a couple of x1 slots for further expansion as required. Ebuyer have board from ASUS and MSI that are both around £23 - £24, and the Sempron is £25.49, making the whole bundle < £50 - cheaper than the i3 on its own....

i echo this as well. my small itx pc running this with win 8.1 is rapid - it has an ssd. even when it had some velociraptors as storage drives it flew.

[probedb]

i echo this as well. my small itx pc running this with win 8.1 is rapid - it has an ssd. even when it had some velociraptors as storage drives it flew.

Did you not see this?

Well I got the 4130T and with a Noctua NH-L9i it's lovely and quiet, cool and is still faster than the Q6600 that came out of it. I think I was due an update

[OneIT]

You should be fine with just about any modern hardware for that kind of application.

I run Serviio including doing transcoding and use plugins for Twitch and iPlayer for my Samsung TV at home. It runs in a Virtual Machine with 1 CPU and 2GB RAM perfectly happily.

Unless your going to want to repurpose it to do folding or the like just get whatever's cheapest