Hey everyone, sorry for starting a new thread for this, but I've been trawling through various fora and sites for a couple of weeks now, but I figured it would be handier to have my own thread to get the advice brought to me instead of going out to gather it all myself
WARNING: long-winded post below, here's the wishlist of parts so far if you don't want to read the whole post:
Alesis io26 (already have this)
Q8200 quad 2.33GHz
500GB Western Digital Caviar, 7200RPM, 16MB cache
Corsair Powersupply 450W, 120mm Vifte, 6xSATA, ATX/EPS, 1xPCI-E, 20/24pin (don't know if this has all the connections I'll need)
4GB RAM
Some sort of motherboard (help please)
Some sort of graphics card (also, help needed)
Anyway, here's the long bit: I'm shit sick of using my crappy Vista laptop for recording so I'm gonna build myself a desktop.
A few months back, I bought myself an Alesis io26 that I got for €250 (I had already intended then to get a desktop, at the moment I can't use the io26 as my laptop has no firewire).
I've got a case off a friend of mine, which has a 160GB hard drive that I'll use for the OS & software. It also has a firewire card, but I'm not sure if it has the TI chip, so I'll probably just use it for external hard drives or whatever.
Now to the parts list/spec/whatever...
I plan to get a Q8200 quad, I've selected a silent PSU (silent according to reviews as opposed to ads) and a 500GB western digital caviar (7200rpm 16MB cache).
The main area of concern for me is the motherboard - there are just so many choices out there. After reading an article in soundonsound though, it seems a Gigabyte might be the way to go as they have onboard TI firewire chips, so I guess the only consideration then is RAM and PCI(e) slots (I wonder if I'm answering my own questions as I type them out, isn't life funny that way...).
Also, I've heard that it's best to get an additional graphics card as opposed to relying on any onboard graphics so as not to tax the CPU too much, but I know nothing about graphics cards, so I'd probably screw up there - I don't know if I should be looking for 256 or 512MB, or what. I figure though I should get one that'll let me connect 2 monitors (eventually), but should the 2 outputs be VGA or something else?
If you've read this far, you are awesome! Hooray for you, now it's time to put your thinking cap on and help out a fellow music-dude
Cheers