"I would say: The more you spend, the more you get!
Buy the biggest, fastest beast you can afford!"
origionally posted by moskus
Not necessarily... This is correct for the most part as Moskus stated, but without doing a bunch of research, you could spend more and get less.
We use Athon processors exclusively in our rigs now as they have (or at least have had) the best bang for buck.
If you take the Athlon route, I strongly recommend taking a look at:
-Asus A7N8X mobo on an NForce 2 chipset
-AMD Athlon Thoroughbred B core processor or one of the new Athlon Barton core chips. (take advantage of 512 L2)
-1024meg of RAM (only reputable companies such as Mushkin, Crucial, Samsung, etc.
- (2)Western Digital JB series harddrives w/ 8MB cache. (Can't beat the price to performance factor on those!) Use one drive for OS and other for you recording apps.
-at LEAST 350w/ power supply (Never skimp on the powersupply) Choose a good company such as Enermax or Whisper
-Video card and sound card of your liking. (remember, you might want to use 2 monitors eventually so keep in mind dual head video cards such as the Matrox G-450 millenium)
This system would be ROCK SOLID and extremely affordable. If your buying a system right now, keep in mind that you might want to buy top spec components as the next Mobo/chipset generation is nearly here taking advantage of 64bit applications and will be built with an entirely different architecture; therefore, the rig you build now probably won't be worth much in the terms of upgrading... In this situation, 'bang for the buck' may be a good route as the money you save could go towards a UAD-1 or a TC Powercore DSP card. Now thats an upgrade! They can breathe new life into tired rigs.
At any rate, it may be a good time to buy. You sure don't want to be one of the first blokes buying a system built on new architecture... Let this system rock your world for the next 2 years. By that time, most of the bugs will be out of the new 64bit toys and they will start to become very affordable. (I can't wait for the Krush 8/Clawhammer series!)
Good luck in your journey!
cheers
ls
