Audio PC for less than £750?

[rohan]

Hi All,

I'm a bit of a newbie to the whole home pc recording thing, but have decided to take the plunge, coinciding with getting a new home PC(Top Budget £750). I have trawled and trawled the various forums, but i'm yet to find the answers to my questions, so here goes.....

The PC will be used for both home (office stuff, internet etc) and audio (i'm not sure what software yet...possibly abelton-see further down, although i've used reason and cubase on a friends pc before).

Ideally I would run a dual boot system, running XP for the audio, and Vista/7 for the other stuff.

I would like a quad core processor and at least 4gb RAM (For future-proofing both tasks)

I havbe sourced a soundcard/keyboard controller - the Line 6 Studio KB37 (About £250)...thoughts, suggestions?

This comes with abelton lite version so would be interested to try it out to keep within budget.

My complete budget for the PC and controller/card is therefore £1000.

Now, I have read that a self-build would be the most cost effective way to go, but i'm not wanting to do that as i've never done anything like it before, and would rather somebody else do it for me!

I have seen audio pc's from Inta-audio, Scan and Darc which are there or thereabouts, but going to a non-audio pc company (pc specialist.co.uk to name one) I can get a more powerful system(better processors,more ram), for a similar price.The audio companies do offer the complete audio setup optimisation however (e.g. silent fans/casing etc) so i'm stuck!

What i'd like to ask is....

1. Would buying a non-audio pc with more power etc be a better option?

2. Are such non-audio companies using inferior components, hence making their setups cheaper?

3. Are there any problems with setting up a non-audio PC for audio use? e.g dual boot/partitioning etc

4. If i'm new to the whole thing, and not a pro audio guy and probably wont be recording vocals, is it worth paying for a silent case/fans from an audio pc company, and therefore putting cost up?

To be honest, if an audio PC company could get a bit close to the spec I could get from a non audio pc company, I reckon i'd do that. I'm wary of getting a PC thats not set up for audio and having to do it myself (incase something goes wrong!).

I hope someone could answer some of these questions and offer some suggestions just to point me in the right direction!

I also appreciate that there are probably no right answers, but it would be nice to get some opinion on the subjects i've discussed.

Many thanks in advance,



_____________

unreal flash
Phase One

[Stercus Vultus]

Seems to me your issues can best be addressed on a forum on music and home audio studios. This forum's focus is on photographics, not audio.

[Dirk]

hi there

what soundcards concerns look for terratec or sounblaster audigy 2 platinum
i have the latter and it is a good sound card able to achieve 102 db(a) SNR !

you need SATA II harddisks and most adviseble in a RAID sollution .
Bulding up a pc your self is fun and not too complicated i do it myself for more than 10 years now, because if you want a pc from compaq or hp or fuijtsu siemens , there nice but still are machines made for the bulk thing

not so long ago (last year december) my old pc gave up the gost and i had to renew a lot.
i choose a core2duo extreme above a quad core because thare is bareley soiftware that makes use of quad core cpu's so i choose a pretty fast duo core e8400 , to gether with a full size mainboard from asus (pk5e) and adata 4 gb dual chanel ddr memmory

the sound card i took over from the old pc *i am a music adict too "
since when i bought my machine the 1tb drives where not there yet i took one samsung 500gb sata ii drive later added a hitiachi 320 gb sata II for my documents and a 200gb maxtor (pata)/ide) for backup

the graphis section i took a evga geforce 8600 gt with 512 mb ram (able to run two monitors)

there video tutorials on the internet how to build your own pc . most of the times when i upgrade or buy new i ask my loca ict shop to put the cpu on the motherboard andf the cooler , not that i can not to this my self but i lke to waranty !

a good , silent a decent psp is needed too as a good case (in my case a coolermaster 333 case)

hope to have helped a bit