Sound Card and Graphics card for Firepod and Cubase SX3

[siddharthsekhsaria]

I am planning to buy a Presonus Firepod and cubase SX3 and run it on PC with following config.

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
Intel P965 motherboard
RAM : DDR2 Transient 533Mhz 2x1GB sticks
HDD : seagate SATA 250GB
Firewire card
Graphics Card : nVidia 7000series

and how imp is the graphics card? is the nvidia 7000series required or can i settle for a onboard graphics card.

which soundcard would be required? will onboard do ?

And lastly i read about FSB somewhere...what exactly is it about ? Does the above config have it ?

Siddharth

[brandondrury]

which soundcard would be required? will onboard do ?

Doesn't matter. You're not going to use it. The Presonus Firepod is the audio interface / sound card (same thing).

and how imp is the graphics card? is the nvidia 7000series required or can i settle for a onboard graphics card.

I'm using a video card that cost me $75 in 2002. By today's standards that should be unusable..but it seams to do fine. I'd just grab a $50 sound card and not think about it.

I'd like to think that a $50 video card would beat the integrated video, but I'm not sure. That would take some research. You may want to do a search on Google just to see what kind of performance you expect out of that integrated video. If it's pretty solid, it should be more than enough. From what I hear, integrated video has came a long way.

And lastly i read about FSB somewhere...what exactly is it about ? Does the above config have it ?

Front Side Bus.

Basically, it's the size of the pipe as far as how much data can flow through your motherboard in a given amount of time. The faster, the better. Just make sure that all of your RAM's max FSB is the same as your motherboards (otherwise, your system will have to use the lower of the two).

You may want to consider getting a seperate drive for audio. This can make a difference if you are using high track counts. Not a robo huge deal, though. You may want to start with this and if you have any issues down the road, add the second hard drive when needed.

Brandon

[andyw]

Most p965 m/bs need a graphics card, unless they have a G suffix. andyw