Old Gaming PC New Use

[OverlordIcy]

Hey all, I fully upgraded my gaming rig a while back and still have most of the parts from my old one. My old desktop was an i7 4770k w/ 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM. It's been sitting in its box collecting dust since, but I've wanted to use it since upgrading to be a Media Server and potentially hosting server(Like hosting some local servers of the games my friends and I play.)

 

My question is a little basic, any good recommendations for a motherboard to be mainly a media server PC. I'm fine with using a PCI-E SSD or M.2 for OS and all as I want pretty much as much storage space as I can get locally inside it with room to make backups of everything internally for recovery. I currently have two 4TB HDDs in my current desktop now with one completely full and the other just over 1TB of videos with intent on putting a lot more into it over time. It would MOSTLY be used for streaming videos from it to another PC and other devices. Mobo Form Factor isn't really a concern, the more ports for storage, the better honestly. No real budget requirements, I'll be saving over time for the parts to set it up. As for servers it might be hosting, nothing big or major, a minecraft server for sure I want running on it honestly I think that'd probably be about it and I live in the USA.

 

A secondary question is would it benefit much from adding a GPU to it at all? I can't think of much more atm, if you have any questions about it just ask away and I'll answer back ASAP, thank you very much for your time and help, it's MUCH appreciated!!

[Fasauceome]

Are you looking for a motherboard for the 4770k and the DDR3? I am selling one.

[Tristerin]

8 minutes ago, OverlordIcy said:

Hey all, I fully upgraded my gaming rig a while back and still have most of the parts from my old one. My old desktop was an i7 4770k w/ 32GB of Corsair Dominator Platinum RAM. It's been sitting in its box collecting dust since, but I've wanted to use it since upgrading to be a Media Server and potentially hosting server(Like hosting some local servers of the games my friends and I play.)

 

My question is a little basic, any good recommendations for a motherboard to be mainly a media server PC. I'm fine with using a PCI-E SSD or M.2 for OS and all as I want pretty much as much storage space as I can get locally inside it with room to make backups of everything internally for recovery. I currently have two 4TB HDDs in my current desktop now with one completely full and the other just over 1TB of videos with intent on putting a lot more into it over time. It would MOSTLY be used for streaming videos from it to another PC and other devices. Mobo Form Factor isn't really a concern, the more ports for storage, the better honestly. No real budget requirements, I'll be saving over time for the parts to set it up. As for servers it might be hosting, nothing big or major, a minecraft server for sure I want running on it honestly I think that'd probably be about it and I live in the USA.

 

A secondary question is would it benefit much from adding a GPU to it at all? I can't think of much more atm, if you have any questions about it just ask away and I'll answer back ASAP, thank you very much for your time and help, it's MUCH appreciated!!

For Secondary question, my HTPC doubles as a Media Server as well (or can) - but I use mine mainly for driving 2 TVs.  1 TV for streaming, 1 TV for gaming at the same time when everyone comes to my house and brings their kids.  I also rarely have LAN parties and it doubles as an extra POS PC someone can use lol.  If you could see yourself using a GPU at all I would do it.  But mine was already in the parts pile so I was glad to put it in a home LOL

[OverlordIcy]

To answer fasauceome, I have a 32GB kit of Dominator Plat DDR3 for the 4770k and I do have an ASUS Z87 Deluxe and Z97 Deluxe I'm fine with using, but I'm open to buying a new board as well for more ports for storage.

 

Tristerin, it'll mostly be a media server for streaming anime and movies to other PC's of mine and probably driving the TV in my room or living room depending on case size I wind up going with(open to suggestions!) I'd be fine with it being able to game, but I already have a hefty gaming PC I upgraded to myself I'd use over it anyways and all my company usually brings their own PC to game on when they come over. So it'll really just be a dedicated NAS for Media Streaming and a Minecraft Server for now, might host more servers on it later though. I don't think it'd necessarily need a GPU, but idk how much it would benefit from having some sort of dedicated GPU if any benefit at all.

 

Thank you both for your help and replies!! I appreciate it all!!

[Fasauceome]

5 minutes ago, OverlordIcy said:

To answer fasauceome, I have a 32GB kit of Dominator Plat DDR3 for the 4770k and I do have an ASUS Z87 Deluxe and Z97 Deluxe I'm fine with using, but I'm open to buying a new board as well for more ports for storage.

Well my asking price of $90 might be too steep for you then, if you're looking for a stock of parts as spares. It's an excellent motherboard with a new warranty but I'm not sure that's what you're after 

[MrCupHolder]

From a quick search it looks like Z87 doesn't support NVME drives and Z97 does, but there's a question around if it will boot from them. So I'd suggest doing some research on your board to see if it will support booting from Nvme.

 

Also the Z97 chipset included support for 6x SATA3 ports. So any motherboards that have more than 6 SATA ports are going to be inclusions by the motherboard manufacturer and going to be using an extra controller to support more drives. My experience with those in the past has revealed that those controllers don't perform as well. But if you're not so concerned about the performance then you may be able to find something with more than 6 ports.

 

Also check carefully any board that has an M.2 slot. Some use PCI lanes others use 2x SATA ports which means it may disable 2 of your SATA ports by installing one.

[OverlordIcy]

On 12/18/2018 at 6:10 PM, MrCupHolder said:

From a quick search it looks like Z87 doesn't support NVME drives and Z97 does, but there's a question around if it will boot from them. So I'd suggest doing some research on your board to see if it will support booting from Nvme.

 

Also the Z97 chipset included support for 6x SATA3 ports. So any motherboards that have more than 6 SATA ports are going to be inclusions by the motherboard manufacturer and going to be using an extra controller to support more drives. My experience with those in the past has revealed that those controllers don't perform as well. But if you're not so concerned about the performance then you may be able to find something with more than 6 ports.

 

Also check carefully any board that has an M.2 slot. Some use PCI lanes others use 2x SATA ports which means it may disable 2 of your SATA ports by installing one.

Thanks! I'm not entirely worried about using NVMe Drives, even for a boot drive as it'd be left on most of the time anyways and only really pulled from when streaming content to another device. As for the PCI-e Lanes, it's not terribly concerning either, I intent to use a LAN Card for one slot and maybe an older Gen GPU, but I doubt it would really need or benefit much at all from having one. I've also been considering the option of RAID Cards(though I don't know much about them or set them up and use them as of right now.) to expand storage capacity. I'm thinking of mostly going with standard 2.5" SSD's for the storage entirely as all the data would only be written once each and pulled from multiple times, so I see no need in working a mechanical to death on reads alone.