Yes, I actually was

Yes, I actually was originally thinking 8gb and 1.5tb but when I started adding up all the costs I wanted to cut back somewhere. It didn’t cut [i]that[/i] much off the total but at the same time I don’t want to pay for performance that won’t really benefit me. I haven’t checked out the hot deals forum yet so I will do that! As for the hard drive space, it’s hard for me to predict because we are in such a paradigm shift going from directv (with dvr) and only playing movies via optical drive and streaming, with a very small amount of playing local content. Time will tell how much our usage will change. I’m sure it will quite a bit. But I figure I can always add a bigger hard drive later and donate the 1tb to another system in the house (1 server, 4 workstations), or archive some stuff on the server as we do now. I also forgot to mention that for the moment, I’m not going to add an optical drive because we’ve got a dedicated bluray player that we’re happy with and that’ll help keep the cost down. Ultimately I’m sure we will though, and the dedicated player will be donated to another room.

So are you agreeing only that this system will perform well or also that it will be relatively low power and therefore require minimal cooling (I actually wonder if running both of the fans in the mobo compartment will be necessary)? I’m probably not as much of a stickler for dead silence as some people here, but certainly the quieter the better!

I appreciate the feedback. Thank you!