bamboo said:
Ditto about VIA
Another thing: Athlons tend to get quite hot, so you'll have to have an efficient cooling system, which is usually quite noisy - a big no-no for DAW.
I've got a 1.533GHz Athlon XP running a Volcano 7+ on med setting with Arctic Silver 3 thermal compound.
Yeah, the med setting makes a bit of noise, but it cools nicely and it's had no impact on the audio I record. I mean, unless you are actually micing the computer that's the only way my computers fan speed would actuall degrade my audio sound. But I'm not micing my computer now am I.
I know fan speeds can cause a problem if they're noisy. But it's only in some cases and not all. It's another one of those debatable things. Some people get away with a super noisy fan and no degrade to recording. And some people don't get off that way and have noticable degrade of quality caused by certain soundcards and noisy fans.
I could run my Volcano 7+ on low setting and have a VERY quite PC, and I've got a fan on my Graphics card, an exaust (80mm) and two intake (80mm) fans, and then my power supply has it's own intake/exaust adding two more fans to the bit. That should if the noise did affect anything for me make my PC the Anti-DAW.
And I've got a panel on my case I installed so I can lower my fans speeds just incase they do make too much noise for a non-system intense application.
it really all depends, where the card is places probably (I did place mine at the lowest PCI slot away from the processor), and what card, and how close you are micing by your case.
...um, guess that's all. More than I wanted to say.