what "big name" (or not) computer to buy?

[Mindset]

Get real. If you're making money with this system performing a service, no person in their right mind would buy a $19 PS and case. If you would actually consider that, remind me to never hire you.

Your right, so I would go spend my money on something better for the same price. Not from a company that sells cheap products to consumers in bulk. I rather spend the money to get quality goods all around.

Why waste money on something like that on a DAW - last time I checked Sonar did not use OpenGL or DirectX video calls.

Your right, none of the softwares use openGL, but like I said, it's cheaper & better to spend your money right. So your saying, that if it costed you $1000 for mediocre system, you would go with that instead of building a more reliable & faster system for the same or less price? I think there's something wrong in your logic. That's like saying hey, lets buy a behringer mixer because its cheap instead of buying something better...

My point is that for the money that it takes to buy a name brand computer, it can cost considerably less for a more powerful system. Why would I spend my money on a company that sells a basic computer for $300 dollars that doesn't have all I need... The last TIME I checked, people who use DAW's need MORE than 80gb of hard drive space & 256mb of ram.

You may get a cheaper PS, but it is warrantied and chances are they'll have a new one in the mail to you should yours die within a work week. When you do DAW work for a living, time is money...

The cheaper PS is a TT 400w powersupply covered by 3 years warranty. I've been troubleshooting & building computers for a LONG time, and all I've seen are emachines, dells & compaq machines come and go.

Oh and on the video thing, you said that where's the "video" cost etc, I'm just stating that when using on board video & sound. Also on any level, for any person who is getting a computer for any purpose that they so choose it for, building their own (if they know what they're doing of course) is the better choice & more economical. I wouldn't spend $100 dollars on a 2.5ghz celeron if I could spend the same $100 on a 2.8ghz pentium D dual core. Time IS money, so why spend x amount of minutes to encode work instead of spending x amount of seconds to encode the same work. Why get a 80gb hard drive when you can get a 200gb hard drive for cheaper of the same brand? It's just too hard for me to understand. Maybe that's why your so smart

 

[mcmd]

I too have a Dell and not a problem with my DAW....just remember for all you tweak-heads that you can't really mess with the BIOS too much ...some people want/need to adjust the memory settings or overclock to maximize performance....

Last year I bought a refurb unit 2.8 GHz pentium HT, 800Mhz fsb, 80 gig drive 1 gig dual channel Ram ( Infenion brand) CD-rom, windows Xp, free s&h 3day, warranty and tech support... no tax .....$349 .....

Dara

 

[Mindset]

I too have a Dell and not a problem with my DAW....just remember for all you tweak-heads that you can't really mess with the BIOS too much ...some people want/need to adjust the memory settings or overclock to maximize performance....

Last year I bought a refurb unit 2.8 GHz pentium HT, 800Mhz fsb, 80 gig drive 1 gig dual channel Ram ( Infenion brand) CD-rom, windows Xp, free s&h 3day, warranty and tech support... no tax .....$349 .....

Dara

THAT would be a good deal... being the pentium 4's were more expensive a year ago. Plus it has a good amount of memory. The only thing is the hard rive, but for a computer that was dated a year ago, that's a decent price.

 

[brzilian]

The cheaper PS is a TT 400w powersupply covered by 3 years warranty. I've been troubleshooting & building computers for a LONG time, and all I've seen are emachines, dells & compaq machines come and go.

Oh and on the video thing, you said that where's the "video" cost etc, I'm just stating that when using on board video & sound. Also on any level, for any person who is getting a computer for any purpose that they so choose it for, building their own (if they know what they're doing of course) is the better choice & more economical. I wouldn't spend $100 dollars on a 2.5ghz celeron if I could spend the same $100 on a 2.8ghz pentium D dual core. Time IS money, so why spend x amount of minutes to encode work instead of spending x amount of seconds to encode the same work. Why get a 80gb hard drive when you can get a 200gb hard drive for cheaper of the same brand? It's just too hard for me to understand. Maybe that's why your so smart

I went to college to study Computer Engineering and have been building computers for about 20 years...

I haven't built my own system in over 8 years and have not had any issues with any off the shelf product (2 being eMachines laptops).

You still don't get the point that I've been trying to make repeatedly. Building your own system may work for some people, but it is not a cut and dry fact that you will get better value for your money doing that in every case, especially if you are not gutting an old system and recycling parts.

 

[Mindset]

I went to college to study Computer Engineering and have been building computers for about 20 years...

I haven't built my own system in over 8 years and have not had any issues with any off the shelf product (2 being eMachines laptops).

You still don't get the point that I've been trying to make repeatedly. Building your own system may work for some people, but it is not a cut and dry fact that you will get better value for your money doing that in every case, especially if you are not gutting an old system and recycling parts.

Great. I get your point, my point was that there are many cases that people can save money by building a custom built computer compared to todays market still. My example was a couple dell's. I haven't been building computers for 20 years but I have been troubleshooting computers for near 8 years now along with building them for people. I was just stating that for example, I made my computer from brand new parts bought in stores & online, while I had some crappy computer I was using (my g/f's), and it's a pretty decent computer (except for the 5200 geforce video), and if it was compared to a similar configured dell, mine beats it for the price by far. If I could have spent cheaper buying a Dell computer that is the same speed as this computer I'm using, or faster, I would, that would be common sense, but for me, it never happens that way. I need my computer speed for various things, I do more things on this computer than just use it as a DAW, I'm messing with video production etc now, so speed matters. Get outdated slower then someone who spent the same amount of money and got half the performance

 

[Joepie]

You still don't get the point that I've been trying to make repeatedly. Building your own system may work for some people, but it is not a cut and dry fact that you will get better value for your money doing that in every case, especially if you are not gutting an old system and recycling parts.

Actually, the point I was trying to make is that for guys like me, the fact that you can gut an old system and recycle parts is the reason why it's cheaper to build my own system. My mouse, keyboard, monitor, case, power supply, CD-ROM drive are all at least 5 years old, but who cares when you have a good CPU, enough RAM and a fast Harddisk to record music with.

And any burglar is gonna think my computer is a 10 years old piece of junk, cuz of the crummy case. It's like a wolf in sheeps clothing, if you will.