Compatibility w/ my system

[guitar kid]

This will be my system
*Intel Pentium/Celeron Single CPU System
*ATX Mid Tower Case with 250 Watt Power Supply
*Motherboard with built in Sound
*3 PCI 2 ISA 1 AGP Slots minimum
*Heavy-duty Heat Sink and Fan Assembly
*1.44 MB Floppy Drive
*104 Keyboard, PS/2 Mouse
*Processor Celeron 400
*Memory 128MB PC100 100MHz DIMM
*Hard Drive 7200 RPM 20.4 GB Ultra ATA/66
*Rewritable/Recordable PlexWriter 8/4/32 CDR-W EIDE (ATAPI)
*Video Card ATI XPERT 128 16MB AGP - Rage 128

My question is, will Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.0 and an Echo Gina soundcard fit into this system without a fuss? If not, why?

Thanx for any responses....

 

[Eddie N]

AHHHHHHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOO .. NO DAMN BUILT IN SOUNDCARDS !!! NO DAMN BUILT IN ANYTHING !! AHHHH ..

sorry for all the emotion , but built in soundcards = BAD BAD things.. if you dont have the cash for a prosumer card , pick up a 20 or 30 dollar card from ensoniq.. i have a 20 dollar aureal card that replaced my built in soundcard and the difference is night and day !!! built in soundcards are too slow and noisey for digital audio.. just make sure you get a pci card..

for your motherboard selection, i would go with the abit be6 rev II.. its about 110 , and i believe it has 5 pci's , one isa , and one agp , and not to mention onboard udma/66 support, and easy upgrade abilty to a pentium III processor..

memory wise , go for pc133 memory not pc100 .. the price difference is about 6% and youll thank me when you want to upgrade to the new PIII chips that run on the 133 mhz bus..

your hard drive selction is a good one , but i would also go with a second smaller hard drive , and use the larger one strictly for digital audio.. things just seem to work better that way...

you left out what OS your gonna be using.. my suggestion is NT4 , its alot more stable than win 98 but more difficult to configure... 2000 is supposedly even better , but its not yet supported by all software and soundcard manufacturers...

cakewalk and the gina should work fine...

keep your stick in your pants..

- eddie -

 

[guitar kid]

Thanks Eddie. The specs I put in my first message were from a personalized PC at www.mpipc.com. Instead, I think I'll buy all the components and get someone to put it together. Just curious, what are PCI's, ISA's and AGP's?

 

[gaffa]

PCI, ISA and AGP slots are the bits where you can plug in all sorts of cards - like modems, sound cards, video card/accelerators etc into you're motherboard.

PCI stands for Peripheral Component Interface, ISA is Industrial Standard Architecture, and AGP is (I think) Advanced Graphics Port.

Basically, the AGP slot is the place where you put your video card, the PCI slots are where you put any 32-bit cards (ie any sort of card you have bought in the last two or three years). This would include sounds cards, network connections, some modems, SCSI interfaces etc.

The ISA slot(s) are there to support the really old 16-bit cards - ancient modems and network cards, for example.

I could go into the finer details of the different bus speeds etc, but it's not that exciting.

Do what I do - if the card looks like its going to fit in a particular slot properly, put it there and don't worry about the complexities.




[This message has been edited by gaffa (edited 03-05-2000).]