The Ultimate audio PC setup

[mixd]

Hey all,

Tell me what you think of the brands I have selected here, scroll down to "building an audio PC". Suggestions or ecxperiences? Please email me or post a reply.
http://recording.mixd.net
recording@mixd.net

[wogg]

You're under-estimating the case / power supply. That is not a good area to go cheap with. Antec is a good brand but I wouldn't reccomend going to the bottom of the line, especially with power supplies. My case pick at the moment is the Antec Sonata (includes a decent power supply) at $105 from newegg.

I like AMD chips but that's just personal preference. You Intel selection is fine. You may want to mention the 'C' series chips with hyperthreading and an 800MHZ FSB, that's where the real speed is.

Asus for motherboards have always been good to me. I would specify going with a Intel 865 or 875 chipset based MB for the Intel chips.

Memory... the best Intel boards use dual channel memory. They require matched pairs of RAM instead of one big stick. Corsair and Kingston are good brands to recommend. Also, get the fastest you can afford. Underclocking your RAM is no problem at all and will allow you to reach more aggressive timings with stability.

No beef with your sound or video card choices.

Hard drives... There is no need to recommend RAID. Hard drive bandwidth is rarely a bottleneck and RAID 0 only doubles your risk of failure. I also noticed you did not specify seperate dedicated audio and operating system disks. That is VERY important. A cheap HDD will do just fine for the OS while a 8M cache, 7200 RPM audio drive on it's own IDE channel (or SATA) will give you plenty of tracks.

Everything else is cool...

[mixd]

Thanks for the advice, it's easy to overlook these things when writing up alot of information really fast. I thought about your RAID comments and realize that is true, it may help when loading files, but it's not enough to risk losing your data. Maybe a RAID 1 array if you have paying clients. Although If that's the case you should own a MAC... Anyway, thanks for the advice, will update!

[Polaris]

Yeah, I agree with Wogg. My benchmarks for my 2500+ compare favorably with a 2.6C P4, which is the 800FSB. I still say the Athlon's a better value. But to each his own. I would at least mention both.