i don't really care about playing the processor war game. as near as i can tell, everyone involved is at least half full of shit at least half the time, so i just wait for lots of benchmarks to come out and make sure what i get doesn't -totally- suck. someone can say what they want about my intel, but it cost about 250 bucks with board and ram, and it's pretty handy on the music rendering. when you get to a certain amount of speed, you're probably going to find the software you use a lot more important than the cpu/hd. i've never done more than 6 or 8 full tracks thus far on my machine, but it specs out to soemthing absurd, like 50. i think i'm going to be ok. i do, incidentally, plan to build a higher-end machine a little later-some manner of RAID on SCSI setup, a nice monster of a processor, 512meg or so of ram, rackmount case, etc. anyone who has used ide and scsi in pretty disk-intensive applications will laugh at the "slightly-faster" assertion you just made. true, the speed of the bus is only a little faster, generally, and the physical speed of the drives is often only a little faster, but the way scsi handles multiple requests makes it so much more efficient than ide that it's sick. a lot of time is lost on ide by only handling commands in a FIFO fasion. with scsi, it sorts the requests according to position on the drive, so it reads everything in a sequence. try driving, when points a, b, c, d, and e are in sequence, to d, a, e, c, and b, and then try it actually in sequence, and you'll see what i mean. very good stuff, and in a nice raid-0 or raid-5 setup, massive speed, if you need it. i'd consider disk speed and ram size more important than cpu speed in almost every case here. it's important to keep also in mind that just because 98654976 gamers are having wet dreams about the new underdog-company-cpu doesn't mean that when you buy, the computer will automatically render large multitrack recordings as well as it plays quake 6. i like the amd's, but there are a LOT of serious design/production flaws in the motherboards, leaving a lot of people with flaky machines that can't be relied on for something really important, like recording. i have to actually incite violence toward my machine for it to crash, even in win98se. that seems pretty good to me, and it does everything quickly enough until i have the money to get a fast, stable machine from the next generation. it's important to keep perspective, rather than simply believing everything tom or anandtech or 96598787 FPS players say as somehow the right answers for another application. i bet that setup you mention, when mature, will make for a great machine (i lean toward scsi drives, though, if you're really serious about it), but make sure you can do something about it when it dumps your 100 hours of work in the middle of mastering
