A nice PC upgrade

worse case, it gets the puter off the floor and less dust to blow out every other month

Thanks for sharing your experience.
Where did the PC use to sit before? From the quote above it could be on the floor and that would kill this hypothesis: could it be you have now taken a vibrating device off a shelf where you have other sensitive equipment? That PC must be vibrating a fair amount, with 3 HDD and a fan or two.

08-22-14: Zd542
Does having a powerful computer like the one you list really offer better sound quality? I never thought playing music on a PC was very resource intensive. What about AMD processors? Do you think it would really sound different than an Intel?

It depends. Playing music is not resource intensive, unless you do digital signal processing. But even for just playing music, it also depends. For example, for JPlay people have found quad-cores sound better than dual-cores, which in turn sound better than single-cores, but none of these was running hard to start with. So don't know why, but that is what is being reported.

For most applications, however, a low-processing power processor is enough. Example: Intel DM2800, like in CAPS v3 Lagoon.
I think the ability to use an audiophile USB card is more important than processing power in a mobo.

Zd,

I have not tried it myself, but several people at other fora tried it time ago and it is a sort of an accepted fact they do sound different, with the SATA sounding "better" because it doesn't introduce additional jitter on the USB bus. This is assuming the DAC in use is asynch USB.

USB stands for universal serial bus, so all processes run in series. So when streaming audio data to the DAC and retrieving data from the HDD those processes are in series. Data retrieval has no timing aspect related, but it seems to add some jitter that affects the audio data stream going to the DAC, and sound quality appears to be affected that way. At least this is the way I've come to explain it to myself :-)

I used to run a laptop with a USB drive and asynch USB DAC and it worked fine. Then moved to a CAPS like server which sounds much better, but honestly many things changed from one server to the next and I have been to lazy to try connecting a USB drive to the CAPS and check it out. I should do it, but it's a little cumbersome because my CAPS runs headless.

Thanks Al. Very pointed, clear and helpful explanation. As usual!