To me, the Mac still has the edge in industrial design and pride of ownership. That said, I use a PC laptop with an i5 processor, 8 gig of memory, and configure JRiver to play the music files from memory.
Really, for the task of delivering a digital stream to a USB DAC, about the only hardware thing that can interfere is disk drive thrash caused by not having enough memory, and the operating system having to swap things in and out of memory from disk. 8 gig should be more than enough when used as a music server.
However, it's important to optimize Windows to insure bit-perfect, hardware direct transmission to the DAC, and the chosen settings can be DAC dependent. These are normally set through the Windows control panel, but it isn't intuitive, so you either need instructions from someone like JRiver or Google the subject to find step-by-step instructions. The description of JRiver over at computeraudiophile.com has a good tutorial on the issues and options.
Really, for the task of delivering a digital stream to a USB DAC, about the only hardware thing that can interfere is disk drive thrash caused by not having enough memory, and the operating system having to swap things in and out of memory from disk. 8 gig should be more than enough when used as a music server.
However, it's important to optimize Windows to insure bit-perfect, hardware direct transmission to the DAC, and the chosen settings can be DAC dependent. These are normally set through the Windows control panel, but it isn't intuitive, so you either need instructions from someone like JRiver or Google the subject to find step-by-step instructions. The description of JRiver over at computeraudiophile.com has a good tutorial on the issues and options.