burthouse

I have tested five streams before and was successful however as ikon stated it will be based on your network. Everything from the switch(s) to your router will have be working correctly to get that many BD streams with full bit rate at the same time. Each BD stream takes peaks around 17-20 Megs/sec so five will push the realistic limit of your network. If you are spending this much on your sever, put a little and get a good switch if you do not already have one.

Thanks for your reply, and that's what I figured and was planning on doing. Though I didn't know each one will push 17-20MB/s so thank you for that info.

I've never tried that many streams at once; certainly not blu-ray. I would say you're going to have to pay particular attention to your network, to ensure you don't experience any lag or jitters. Also, your HDD performance could be an issue.

Others in this forum have more experience than me with multi-streaming so they will hopefully chime in soon.

As far as the RAM is concerned, WHS2011 is limited to 8GB max.

Yeah, hopefully they will. I know the network is going to possibly be one of the big choke points. I plan on running raid 5 with Sata III 7200 rpm drives on a highpoint raid controller so the drives should be alright.

Also thanks for that tidbit of info didn't know that was the max.

I think the consensus of many is that Intel has basically won the CPU wars, particularly at the higher end. The latest i-series chips really have advanced the state of the art. AMD is not keeping up. They seem to be hanging their hat on the CPU/GPU combo platform, counting on higher GPU performance to differentiate themselves.

With everything you want to do I agree you need an i5 or better.

Thanks for the reply, but for everything I want the i5 would have no issues of keeping up? Also 8gb of ram sufficient?