Wow, the interface on the forum changed
bongolation
Yes, it can be frustraing trying to figure out what's good for your computer needs, The big AMD vs. Pentium War is more for the gamers and overclockers, overclockers love AMD because you can unlock the multiplier and get a higher clock speed. Pentium is still the more popular for DAWs, due to some lingering compatabillity issues with high end sound cards and AMD, I also recomend Pentium, though I could go either way.
OK the building decisions.
Start with the case, you'll want at least a mid tower, with good ventilation, add a fan or two. you'll want a 300 watt power supply. Other options are full tower or rack mount, again keep ventilation in mind. you might want to buy that locally, to avoid shipping cost.
The Mobo: the above mentioned Asus CUSL2 is a great board, probably the best available for pentium socket 370, I have one, it's extremely stable. If you want to add your own video card, save $15 - 20 and get (check into, I get a little sloppy with the word "get") the CUSL2 - C. that is of course if you want to go the intel route. If you want to go the AMD route, you'll have to get the information from some AMD DAW users.
The Processor: I'll suggest the PIII 800 EB, cost to performance, it's the best Pentium out right now. any more is really overkill for a DAW, and just a year ago, people were doing just fine with 500 Mhz or less on a pc100 platform. P4 is overkill
The memory: just get high quality pc133, 256Mb's should be plenty 512 even better. if possible (money wise) get a single stick of 256Mb's.
www.crucial.com or just look for micron brand, that's what crucial sells. cas 2, unbuffered or buffered, no ECC, non parity... will work great with the Asus Cusl2. DDR is overkill + you have to build your system around it, not your soundcard + most people using it right now don't realize that there mobo isn't capable of DDR transfers, and it's working in SDRAM mode anyway.
Hard Drive: I suggest Western Digital, 40 Gig, UDMA 100, 7,200 rpm . It's based on a 20 gig per platter platform, making it an ultra silent and fast drive, you can't even hear it defrag. if you can, get a second hard drive somewhere in the 5-10 gig range to keep your programs on.
well, thats the vitals less soundcard, CDRW, CDROM, Video, Monitor, Speakers, Etc. Etc...
It's also just my 2.34 cents worth.
TX
PS, on the Asus Cusl2 , only use 2 of the memory slots, so if you want 512 megs get two sticks of 256, not 128 128 256, there are reported performance issues using all 3 slots.