Hello. Need digital recording advice.

[threeeyes]

Hello everyone. I'm Gary. I'm new here and am glad to have discovered a community devoted to home recording.

I have a question: I'm pretty sure I'll be buying a computer dedicated solely for recording audio projects (song demos). There's this comp on sale and I'd like some advice on whether it will be suitable for my needs. My needs are: Most of my projects will be 18 to 20 tracks or less. I could occasionally record several tracks at once. I'll be running Pro Audio 9 or Cubase LE. I will probably employ plugin effects (sometimes many simultaneously, sometimes not so many). Most songs would run 4 to 5 minutes. My sound card could be an Aardvark Q10 or M-Audio Audiophile or some such quality card.

Here's the comp I'm thinking about:

Compaq
AMD Athlon XP 3000+
512MB PC2700 DDR Memory
160GB UDMA Hard Drive

What I'm most concerned about in this setup is the AMD Athlon. Can it perform the tasks I'm asking of it? Is it equivalent to a Pentium 4?

Thanks so much in advance for any help you can provide!

 

[Stealthtech]

The components are ok and will perform well
but the company sucks

your best bet is to build one

 

[threeeyes]

Thanks for the quick response. Do you mean their support sucks? Warranty sucks? I could build one but I'm not exactly an expert. I can get this setup for $600 after rebate. Unfortunately I can't go much higher than that at this time. I could upgrade to a faster speed of RAM if need be later on.

 

[maybe vampires]

you really dont need a compound of knowlege to build a computer, if you go to the right place the sales people there will be more than happy to help you in anyway. i have built may of computer for myself and friends and even made a few buck off of it and i have never used anything but athlons and never had any real trouble, just watch your software and hardware as some might not be compatable

 

[BlackDog]

the compaq machines suck because they have cheap components. and most of the things are integrated in the motherboard. their cases suck too, hard to work with when you need to change the hardware. the designs are awful. the system comes with a lot of garbage software that in the long run contributes to slow the pc down. i've had enough bad experiences upgrading my cousins' computers... so i have a very negative image of compaq. if i have to get a brand name machine, i'd go for dell (or sony... though too expensive). best is to build your own.

-shami

 

[threeeyes]

Thanks guys. Very enlightening. Can anyone give me a short overview of the steps I'll need to take to build a good recording computer but not break my bank? I'll do some net research and also search this board's archives but any links to helpful sites concerning this would be much appreciated. Thanks again.

Yes Sony is too expensive. I'll look into Dell.

My roommate knows a bit about computers but his attempts to build them usually ended badly and that has made me a little phobic about it. But then again he was trying to rebuild older comps.

 

[manning1]

just search the forum . this has been covered lots of times.
another poster on here likes the amd mp2400+ processor for 77 bucks. sounds like a great deal to me for the results he was posting.
also get TWO drives not one humungous drive. your PC will be happier....
and so will you.
multitrack software i highly recommend.....search the forum under my nom
de plume....

 

[Polaris20]

Actually, not all Compaqs suck. I thought the same thing until I got my current IT gig.

We use the Evo's, which are the business desktops, and they use Seagate drives and come loaded with pretty much nothing as far as bloatware.

They use either Gigabyte or Asus motherboards. Nice stuff, and well built.

The Presarios are crap though, for sure.

In fact if I were to buy a prebuilt, an Evo would be the way I'd go. Or an HP workstation like an XW6000, which we also have a couple of.

Really well built machines.

But the home stuff I'd stay far away from.

Check this out:

http://www.hp.com/workstations/ia32/xw6000/