Not yet ready to ditch your traditional home theater setup but still want the convenience of digital playback on your TV? Or maybe you intend to have multiple mediaserver boxes around the house and require some way to control and access your content from one place. In this case, an ideal solution is to invest in a media server. Don't let the word 'server' scare you though. You won't need a temperature-controlled room with a team of administrators on 24-hour shift. A media server is but a PC converted to act as a dedicated central storage library to backup and organize all your audio, video and image files.
Of course, all these goodies just sitting in storage isn't going to do you any good. What you want is to be able to retrieve this content from other PCs in your home or stream music and video to your Hi-Fi and TV. While it wouldn't be a problem achieving this by creating a LAN with other PCs and mediaservers, you can't really plug a network card into your home theater equipment. That's where a good media extender comes into play and we've got that end covered as well.
We've also built our media server on the premise that it would also be used as a media processor. No point having all that processing power and letting it sit idle. Safeguard your DVD collection for storage or edit that family vacation footage into a video montage, our media server is powerful enough for everyday encoding needs.
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ASUS P5GD2 Premium (915P)
SRP: US$176
A server, even a home one should be made as stable and reliable as possible. As far as motherboards go, we have to give ASUS the credit for being very well built, so the choice of the ASUS P5GD2 Premium was obvious. This motherboard was the winner of our Intel 915P shootout before, sporting incredible storage capabilities and a powerful mix of performance and stability you can't find anywhere else in this class. |
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