SPCR

Hi

Firstly apologies if I should start to ask the obvious!

I was initially looking to purchase a NAS for file store, multimedia
network stream to multiple devices (iPad etc) around the house and to
use as a "download" box (Usenet).

However due to the hardware constraints I wasn't overly impressed when
reading user feedback especially with downloading on faster Internet
connections such as 50MB and transcoding video for it to be streamed.

I would like a quiet setup, so I was look at a fan-less motherboard
such as the Asus AT5IONT-I are there any other alternatives? I assume
a case intake / extract fan is still advise?

If you could make any recommendations I'd appreciate it, doesn't have
to be fan-less I am happy to go with a "quiet" fan cooled variant.

It has too...

- Usenet NZB downloads, 50MB Virgin (6mb/sec)
- Handle on the fly transcode/stream Video to iPad, iPhone, PS3 - why
- Do I want an Ion motherboard at the very least?

Many thanks,

Downloading is no big deal. Well, rather, it's not a big technical deal.

On-the-fly video transcoding? Depends on your starting quality and result quality. I would not expect any quiet and inexpensive system to be able to do it, with a file that is indistinguishable from broadcast (unless by, "transcoding," you really just mean demuxing and muxing). On top of that, how well it will work will be highly software-dependent. What software do you use to stream to your devices now, and what performance are you getting from your decent PCs, doing it?

There are three possible reasons for wanting an Ion server:
-you want to overclock a lot
-you want a full-bandwith PCIe bus
-you're going to make use of whatever hardware video encoding/encoding features the graphics subsystem has
Otherwise Pineview uses less power and is much cheaper.

The Atom boards designed for fanless operation do not need a case fan provided the case is open enough at the right places.

Specialized hardware is much more efficient than CPUs at decoding video streams. I assume it's the same deal when it comes to encoding.