So I don't want you guys to think I'm not doing research on this, cause that's far from the truth, but I want your input being that there is a great deal of brain power on reserve here in the forums and this will be my first time actually building a system, though I'm not unfamiliar with the process.
I plan on building a computer especially, though not exclusively, designed for audio recording. It doesn't have to be top shelf, but sufficient and more than basic. Obviously processing power is important here, as is memory, but of course these are general requirements for any high performance computers. So I want some hardware recommendations. I'm not especially concerned with video cards, but I do watch movies on my computer from time to time and this will be my only computer when I'm done, as some of the parts of this computer will be sacrificed to the project to save money (harddrives, floppy, cdr, dvd, etc), so I need a compitent video card but nothing fancy. I'm not opposed to a motherboard with built in video. I need recommendations on most-bang-for-your-buck (leaning slightly more towards buck than bang) motherboards, processors (obviously those two need to be compatible) with the idea that expansion at some point in the future is intended. I need recommendations for powersupplies probably. This I'm not sure about.
I've got two computers currently, both Compaq (a company I'm less than satisfied with however). Both presarios, one a 5724 with a celeron (which my brother recently gave to me, and I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the case off, so if someone could help me with that, I don't understand why it's so difficult) and a 5000 (with pentium 4). Between the two of these I've got two power supplies, and I'm not sure if either one will end up working with my potential mother board. I've got two floppy drives, a zip drive, two dvd drives, and a cdr drive. I also want to put all the harddrives from these boxes (three) in the new one, possibly with room for one more, and this means I'll probably need a new case, though the 5724 is a rather large case, but since I can't get it open, I don't know how much room for hard drives it has.
As far as the sound card, which is the piece of hardware I'm most concerned with, but least sure about, I would like some suggestions too, I know I have a lot of options, but I'm not sure yet what exactly is best for my needs.
Also I'm planning on running linux on this box, my head is set on Gentoo at the moment, though I know there are some distros out there specifically for audio, i simply haven't seen any yet that I really liked overall. I am still open to suggestion on that aswell, since this computer is kind of a fresh start for me since everythin I have is a tad outdated.
I want to keep costs as low as possible with out sacrificing TOO much performance.
What do you think?
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Without love in the dream It will never come true
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