Hi, I am planning on building a home media server witch i will manly use to store all my photo back-ups and all my other media. At the moment I have an old p4 3.2 chip [socket 478],which i kinda wanna use.The ploblem is that i will have to buy a new motherboard for it and i can only find new ones that take ddr2 memory so i will not be able to use a 1g ddr1 stick that i have.They do have 4 sata ports which is fine cause i can put in 4x1 TB hard driks which will be ebought space for me. So would it be better to just buy a cheap 775 board and a new cheap celeron proccesor as i have to buy a stick of ddr2 ram anyway as i can't get hold of any of the older boards. Thanks Mark
It is rarely a good idea to buy a mainboard just to use an outdated CPU & ram. The exception would be if you could find something super-cheap & maybe used. That said, the old P4 will not be able to do blu-ray while recording TV. If you don't need blu-ray or TV recording, the old P4 should be just fine.
DDR2 memory is dirt cheap, I wouldn't worry about having to replace that. As far as your CPU goes if you are looking to stream HD content I would upgrade from the P4 to a cheap chip like the E5200 (70 USD) and some 775 motherboard. However if you have access to a dirt cheap 478 motherboard and are only going to watch SD content you would be able to do this for less money. And by dirt cheap I mean <25$. Spending any more than that and you might as well shell out a bit more for something exponentially faster. There are mATX motherboards in the 50$ range.
