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There are isolation boxes that I expect would work. My desktop at home is in a big case with a lot of ventilation and a couple of large fans. The fans are so big that they barely have to move to keep the case cool, so they're pretty quiet. It's so overbuilt that it barely breaks a sweat, even on...

Well, you can buy a box that just provides phantom power, but that's all it does. A small mixer does that and much more for not much more money.

Condenser microphones generally need to be powered by the device they're connected to, typically a mixer. It's called phantom power, and a 1/4" mic input won't supply it.

Many digital mixers are capable of recording multitrack onboard and/or to a DAW. I have a UI24R, and it's pretty effective for live mixing and recording. I haven't tried it in a studio setting, but I think it would do reasonably well. It records to a USB stick, which has to be fast enough and...

You should probably engage the pad on the mic itself. The active circuitry in the mic can be overloaded by loud sources. Decreasing gain downstream won't undo that clipping.

Most of the devices I've used that use a USB stick need FAT32. A couple have size limits (e.g. 32 GB max for recording on my UI24R).

Has it been unusually humid where you are? I've had condensers start generating noises after being stored in high humidity for a while.

I have done that, usually at different distances, hence time alignment.

I use two mics on a snare and I never worry about polarity because the sound of the bottom has almost no resonant elements. It's pretty much just the white-ish noise of the wires. And I high-pass it so what little it has in common with the top is further reduced. On a guitar cab, I definitely...

I record the whole band live, maybe without the vocal if they know the song well enough, and replace as needed. My goal is to get a complete drum take to build on. I'll generally have the bass, guitars etc. go direct at this stage, then mic them for real takes. But this all requires having...

...whether you want them to or not. That said, Windows machines do that to some degree, though not quite as aggressively.

Bit depth (word length) mostly sets the digital noise floor. I would bet the guitar has enough noise that 16 bit audio won't be the weak link, as long as your gain structure is decent (don't go into the reverb with very low levels).

But, yeah, it's probably a self-contained unit.

I was thinking DA88 or something, especially with outboard compression.

What unit? If it's a tape machine, you're going to be spending enough on tapes to make a computer look pretty attractive in not very long. Getting it serviced will seal the deal. You don't need a super special computer or an expensive DAW to make great recordings. I record on an old Win7...

The connection may not behave well with the Mackie's input rings grounded. It should, but that doesn't mean that it does. What happens if you partially insert the plugs so the tips connect to the socket's rings?

What Dave said. Also, you're using the computer's built-in headphone amp and worried about an amp adding noise?

If the connection is balanced, lifting the audio ground(s) might solve it. Lifting power ground as a diagnostic test is okay, but it's technically not the correct solution.

Do you have Direct Monitor engaged and software monitoring disabled?

No, it was a known issue with at least some of them, and it was something that I heard about by the mid-80s when the mixers were probably less than a decade old. Other mixers that suffered the same treatment didn't have that problem.