Trying to build a cost-effective A/V PC (NON DS)

Hey, turns out the so called "media deck" at my school's auditorium is extremely outdated, and pretty much stupidly designed in my sense. 5 independent DVD drives, a PATA HDD recorder, blegh. Anyways, I brought up the idea of replacing all the components with a modern PC. So, I can pretty much tell them the parts, they'll order it, and I'll just sit and construct the whole thing then and there.

I need advice on parts, though. What I'm looking for are the following:

1. Multiple CD/DVD/BD Drives. BD drive not necessary but preferable (only one needed if you can fit it)
2. Quality A/V. I'll be hooking it up directly to a video and sound mixer, so please add something decent for graphics and sound, heh.
3. Low Noise, Low Profile
4. Fast. SSDs would be nice but probably aren't cost effective.

Budget - ~$1000. Highly improbable of having it in this region, but that's my goal.

The current thing I have is this

CoolerMaster HAF 922
Intel Core i7 920 (To be overclocked)
Corsair H50 cooler (I said I wanted low noise and cost effective, air CPU coolers escalate in speed/noise as the CPU heats up, i don't want that...)
EVGA X58 3-Way SLI (With E-LEET OC software)
Asus Xonar D2 Sound Card
Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 6GB @ 1333Mhz (3x2GB)
Zotac 9600 GSO Graphics Card by nVidia
Asus Black 4x BD-R drive
Sony Optiarc Black CD/DVD Reader/Burner
Microsoft Windows 7 Professional Full

Price - ~1700

Eh, overpriced. Anyone got a better suggestion?


Edited by ablahblah - 24 Apr 2010 at 2:08pm

the maximum on time for this system will probably be up to 3 hours at most, so I'll probably keep the GPU fan speed on lockdown all the while. anyways, the GPU i'm not overclocking at all, might even underclock it, just to keep the noise level down.

on my rig the CPU cooler is significantly higher than that of my GPU

lol well if you had the haf teh cpu cooler wouldn't have to work as hard

well I was just messing with you about the case, but which cooler did you get?

so what cooler is making noise then? lol did I miss something again?

Noctua is very quiet but if the size is a problem then thats different I guess.

stock coolers are loud.

Edited by DST4ME - 22 Apr 2010 at 8:33pm

ya but think about all tose poor kids that go home thinking h50 and asetek are good.

Originally posted by sirsiddius What do you mean by 'media pc'? Is it something for art or engineering students to use for creating complex 3D models? Or is it something used to show movies and power-points at assemblies? (In which case a nice sub $500 dell or HP would do nicely.)

Something to show movies, power points, run lots of audio, etc. We have a pretty advanced media and lighting mixer, we just have a really crappy removable media setup. Someone brought in a really old PC that managed to work with our system through S-Video to F-Jack, but that's not gonna stay for long. I just wanna take a new PC, outfit it with at least 3 or 4 disk drives that'll take whatever media we throw at it, and pretty damn decent sound and video, all the while being nice and quiet.

A dell? NOOOOO i do NOT trust that company. Besides, they don't have enough slots for at least 3 CD/DVD drives, 5 would be preferable. Other things dell doesnt offer are decent sound cards, decent video cards, and unlocked clock speeds (hey, I wanna try doing a little tweaking on this thing, lol)

New Rig
HAF 922
I7 920
Noctua NH-U12P
Asus Xonar D2
EVGA X58 LE
Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 4GB
Zotac 9600 GSO
Asus BD-R
Sony Optiarc CD/DVD Reader
Windows 7 Pro

By the way, the noctua will be oriented fans facing to the left, right? Any way it can be aimed up, so I can, say, slap a high static pressure fan to the top and just vent air out using the principle of rising heat?

that's 92mm though....
the noctua i just selected has dual 120mm o_o

this one I'll try to OC, but mainly, i just want very low noise.

Eh, you know, actually maybe OC'ing isn't the best of ideas. The performance benefit isn't really needed, actually. The one you suggested was quieter, though, right?

any way of mounting the nh-u9b in such a way that the fan points up in a normal motherboard orientation?

also, any ideas on SSDs....

Noctua has good directions with their stuff.  Here is the manual http://www.noctua.at/pdf/manuals/noctua_nh_u9b_se2_manual_en.pdf check out orientation "A" vs. "B".  It's easy to mount the cooler the way you want.

depends how much you want to drop on the sdd, if the budget is high then intel x25E would be great, if not then the x25M will be good too, if not then look at corsair and vertex. remember the smaller the ssd the slower the speeds.

Edited by DST4ME - 22 Apr 2010 at 11:38pm

If you're just for doing what you're doing (movies audio mixing/creation) Have you thought about a nice i5 system 8gb dual channel ddr3 With a 5770 gpu.

That's is if you're trying to stay you're original budget of 1000usd budget.


Edited by sirsiddius - 23 Apr 2010 at 1:52pm

I thought he wanted an x58 platform.

in that case they are right, you should go with i3 IMO or amd and just pick the lower end of everything case you will not notice the difference for media use.