I think part of the problem is that you're asking questions that could have many different answers depending on your use case. Asking for a video card that will "run Red October HQ" is kind of like asking "how long is a piece of string?" MadVR has a lot of different settings. The absolute maximum settings are beyond the capabilities of even very high-end cards, and the lowest settings can be less graphics card intensive than Red October Standard.
Modern Intel integrated GPUs on the "Core" processors (i.e. the HD5000 and HD6000 series that shipped with Haswell i3's, i5's, and i7's) will actually run Red October HQ at medium to medium-high settings (depending on the model). The lower power intel processors (Celeron, etc.) typically don't have the "nice" iGPUs, so those are a different kettle of fish. I don't have any AMD hardware so I can't comment on that.
If you want performance better than intel's integrated graphics, the standard recommendations here are an Nvidia 750Ti or the new 960. To give you a calibration, a 660Ti is better for MadVr than the integrated graphics, but not by a huge distance. iGPU's have come a very long way in recent years (at least on the intel side, but I assume AMD has as well).
For your server build generally, a few thoughts:
1) Total RAM size isn't really that important unless you're running virtual machines. JRiver is a 32-bit program so it can't even theoretically use more than 4GB of RAM on a 64-bit OS, and in practice, I've never seen it exceed 2Gb. For a pure server application, you probably don't need more than 3 or 4GB (my server runs on 4GB and never uses all of it), for an HTPC application you probably want a bit more. I don't know how much RAM crashplan eats, but one of my HTPCs has 8GB of RAM, and I've never seen it run out of RAM, so 8 may be enough unless crashplan is very hungry or you plan on doing other things with the computer.
2) The CPU you choose is only important if you plan on using the server for transcoding. If you just plan on using the server to support other JRiver client PCs that can play back all formats natively, you could probably get away with a much weaker CPU (I've used a dual-core celeron for this, it's basically a fileserver at that point).
3)
However if you plan on watching video using Gizmo or JRemote on devices (tablets, etc.) or if you plan on serving content via DLNA to a device like a smart TV, apple TV, etc. you will need a fairly powerful CPU because those applications typically require transcoding video on the fly. The conventional wisdom is that for each HD stream you're transcoding at once your CPU needs 2000 Passmark benchmark points, see CPU benchmarks here:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ Your proposed CPU has roughly a 5000 passmark, which means it could probably handle two simultaneous streams, but definitely not a third. If you add simultaneous local playback to the list, that eats up some cycles too depending on your setup.
So if you know that you won't be doing any transcoding, that CPU is more than enough. If you think you might have a need for transcoding, but not tons of devices at once, that CPU is a good fit. If you think you might need more than two simultaneous transcoded streams (or one stream and intensive local playback) you may need to get something beefier.
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Topic: Please help me build a server (PC based) (Read 9902 times)