[bhobba]

I am in the process of getting a laptop to act as playback device for my WFS DAC 2 using JRiver that is arriving soon.  Went down to the local PC store to get an I5 with 4GB but they reckoned an I3 with 2gb would probably be plenty - and its half the cost.  I did s quick check on my I7 home machine and it didn't even break a sweat - one thread peaked a little bit at about 30% of max and all the others about 3% or so and it didn't even use 1gb of memory.  My gut feeling is it should be ok - what do others think?

Thanks
Bill 

[firedog]

If it is just a music server, it should be fine. I use a dual core atom (not as powerful) with 2 GB and have no problem.

Just make sure you also turn off all the windows and applications and services you don't need if you want the best performance and sound.

You should appreciate the store, as they didn't suggest you buy the more expensive option.

[bhobba]

You should appreciate the store, as they didn't suggest you buy the more expensive option.

Thanks for the skinny.  Yea - thats why I go back to them - they are bit more expensive than elsewhere but they know their stuff, give good advice, will help if you have problems, and will not steer you to more expensive stuff.  I suspect they know its in their interest to have long term customers rather than a bit of short term profit.

Thanks
Bill

[ctviggen]

I'm not sure what J River is, but I'm using a computer at work that has Squeeze Server on it to serve my music to me via headphones.  I believe the computer is dual core but only has 512k RAM, but I also only have Windows XP.  I often have upwards of 20 windows open while serving music.  Serving music should take almost no processing power, even converting from FLAC to WAV.

[doctorcilantro]

I also use a dual core ATOM, with 4GB, and J. River MC15.

It's not so much power, but drivers you have to watch out for. Wireless cards can affect performance of a system even if you are using the wired NIC to stream in audio. Even then, I discovered that ASIO (Lynx) resulted in excessive system latency, whereas WASAPI did not. Probably board and device driver specific, but these latency problems can still creep into today's gear. You should be fine with that system; re-reading it seems you won't be streaming from another PC/server (J. River Library Server) to that laptop, correct?