Audio Recording PC - Hardware Advice

[palace_monkey]

I received this spec for a computer designed primarily for audio recording. Thing is it comes in at around £650 and the budget is only £500. Is there anywhere I can save a little money while not getting major bottlenecks or problems for future upgrades?

Sony DWQ30AB 16x16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter (Beige) - OEM (CD-045-SO)£24.50
Sapphire ATI Radeon X550 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GX-098-SP)£39.95
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) - Retail (ADA3000BPBOX) (CP-117-AM)£99.95
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Music - Retail (SC-034-CL)£77.50
Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 250GB 2500KS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-046-WD)£69.95
Crucial 1GB (2x512MB) DDR PC4000 Ballistix Dual Channel Kit (BL2KIT6464Z503) (MY-041-CR)£89.95
Gigabyte K8NF-9 nForce4 (Socket 939) PCI Express Motherboard (MB-032-GI)£59.95
Pioneer DVR-110DBK 16 x 16 DVD±RW Dual Layer ReWriter - (Black) OEM (CD-031-PO)£24.80
Antec Sonata II Piano Black Quiet Case - 450W Smart Power PSU (CA-040-AN) £69
Subtotal£555.55
VAT£97.23
Total £652.77

Thanks in advance

Adam

 

[tomsega]

Not really.

You could get a Athlon 64 2800 instead of a 3000
You could get a smaller, regular S-ata hard drive
You could a cheaper case, but considering that includes the PSU thats probably a bad idea.

Basically that would save about £50, but it would also hit performance a little and probably wouldn't be worth it.

I think PC3200 RAM would be better, because thats what Nforce 4/Athlon 64 boards are designed for - and the RAM and CPU will work better if they are synchcronised. IE, your CPU will want to run at 200fsb, which will make PC3200 run at its native 400mhz. If you wanted to run PC4000 you'd have to set the memory speed to 133% (or something, I can't remember the actual number) - which wouldn't be beneficial because they would be unsynchronised.

PC4000 is more of an Intel thing as they use higher fsb speeds. PC4000 requires an FSB of 250 - which would overclock your CPU very much. So, you'd only want PC4000 if you were upping the FSB speed to overclock the processor, because that would obviously give you head room.

But decent PC3200 is about the same price anyway.

 

[Me__2001]

theres not alot you could change, maybe some cheaper RAM and change to a sempron, you could also get an audigy soundcard and a 200GB SATA drive, might save you about £80

 

[muckshifter]

Drop the Sony ... thats it.

 

[palace_monkey]

Thanks for your help guys, I think I'll stretch the budget, is it definitely worth going for the PC3200 RAM over the PC4000 or will it not make too much difference?

 

[floppybootstomp]

Why you got two DVD burners listed?

imo Pioneer and NEC currently making best DVDRW's.

You don't need PC4000 memory unless you want to overclock.

Keep the big hard disk, WAV files take up a lot of space.

I don't like Gigabyte boards, had some nasty experiences with them and their RAID controllers are rubbish.

You could get an Asus board and actually use the onboard sound, unless you specifically wanted a front panel interface that comes with the Creative card. If you weren't happy with onboard sound, then add a sound card, but Asus onboard sound is good.

I can't really see you making cuts without impacting performance.

 

[tomsega]

Thanks for your help guys, I think I'll stretch the budget, is it definitely worth going for the PC3200 RAM over the PC4000 or will it not make too much difference?

Nope. There is no point in getting RAM that needs to run at 250fsb, when you are getting a processor that needs to run at 200fsb. Because pc3200 is basically the standard for Athlon 64 boards, people find low latency RAM to improve the performance instead.

This is why Corsair have value pc3200 as well as PRO pc3200 - they both go at 400mhz, but PRO will have lower latency timings and thus go faster. You probably wouldn't notice though - I'd just get a matched pair of 512mb Corsair Value. That'll save you 20-40 quid.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Corsair value select 1Gb matched pair £64.00 at Komplett, inc. VAT + postage, which is a typical price.

That'll save you about £42.00.

El Linko