[Wolves] Building a PC: suggestions

[Old Dan]

Jono Bacon wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> Right, I need to build a PC for sound engineering. The
> main requirement for this machine is a shitload of
> memory, fast disks, lots of disk space and a fast
> processor. I am not bothered with a flash graphics
> card, sound card etc - I have those covered and
> onboard graphics will be fine.
> 
> I was wondering if any of you could suggest a good
> motherboard, processor, memory, disks etc. There are
> some requirements:
> 
>  - I want an Intel Pentium processor. AMD processor
> chipsets have certain issues and I want to avoid
> these.
/Via/ chipsets have issues, yes.  They aren't the only kids on the block 
- you could go with an AMD chipset (though these have problems of their 
own) or an ALi chipset which is what I have used without issue so far.

If you really want an Intel system then by all means go for it (the 
stories about Athlons vs AMD processors with the AMDs winning hands down 
clock-for-clock no longer hold anything like as much water, particularly 
for the faster PIVs) but please bear it in mind that obviously Intel is 
more expensive.

>  - Disk speed is very important, and I need something
> that is reliable and fast. I also need a
> motherboard/controller to support this.
Well for disk /speed/ you could go with SATA - it is extremely fast and 
has the added bonus of being RAID.  It all depends on how much headroom 
you want with the controller regarding future upgrades.

Picking the HD itself is the usual throuhput/latency trade-off.

>  - I would preferably like at least a gig of memory.
As others have said, that is the easy bit.  Memory is dirt cheap these days.

> I want to build all this for under £500.
It'd be better if you'd quantify a bit about what you actually want TBH. 
  'Lots of disk space' could mean anything from 80Gb to 160Gb to 4 
Terabytes.... :)

-- 
Dan