PC for sound Production & sound Processing <40k

[lethal]

Hey fellas,

As the title says... need to make a PC with the budget <40k.

Will be using the PC mainly for sound production & sound processing stuff. Someone also recommended me Mac Book Pro, said it was around 40k smthing. Is that a better option than a desktop? I know the budget is low thinking of what i'll be doing on PC... but then again, i need what's best i can get in <40k.

Waiting for the GODs to reply.

P.S. Wouldnt mind adding another 5k if the equipment will drastically improve performance, but not more than that.

 

[cranky]

Does the 40K include the interface cost? Those things get really expensive really quick. What about monitoring? Is that to be included as well? A pair of decent monitors will set you back by about 40K all by themselves.

If the cost is only for the box and bits, a desktop makes much more sense unless you have to do live sound as well, that is when a Macbook Pro will help. I'm not really sure you get a Pro model for anything less than 60K but at 40K it would be a good bet.

In any case if you do decide to go Wintel, be aware that Windows is terrible for music production. You can make XP work for you somewhat, but Windows 7 has high enough DPC latency to severely limit your recording ability. So it's either crashes galore on XP, or messed up overdubs on Windows 7, you choose. Macs will definitely be better, but be prepared to spend over 60K on a Mac with sufficient processing power.

In a Wintel box the thing is to go with as much memory as possible, and as far as possible stay with Intel, including Intel original boards. Their sucky performance is compensated by guaranteed compatibility with software and hardware, which in a studio situation becomes the most important thing - you wouldn't want three-hour recording sessions interrupted by a crash. Ensure you have a quiet system - good fans and a nice quiet case will cost a bit more but will help during mixdown and recording. A quiet cooler and a fast dual-core processor is the way to go, render speed is usually more important than parallelism unless you run 40+ tracks with lots of DSP.

I'm sure people here will fill in the blanks with exactly what to buy, and you'll get a lot more suggestions

When I used to produce I was on AMD (I still am exclusively on AMD) and it wasn't too bad, but there were always a few niggles with hardware drivers and latency. Those have since seemed to sort themselves out, but for the short period of time I used an Intel original board production was a snap, with extremely low latency, nice clean power to PCI boards and a reasonably quieter system at default than AMD. I'm sure nothing much has changed since then, at least not in the parameters that matter for this functionality.

 

[Gannu]

What sort of applications would you be using? I am not aware of those used in the audio industry but if they are optimised to run on quad cores, you can bank on a Phenom II X4 processor or better still, get the newer X6 1055T since the price difference is about 1.5~2k. You would ideally need a motherboard with a lot of expansion slots (more of PCI I presume?) for the cards you might be using? So get a full-ATX board with preferably a newer chipset such as 880G/890GX/890FX etc from Gigabyte or another reputed manufacturer. If you are going the Intel way, get the i7 920 D0 and an X58 board from Gigabyte or likewise - but the combination would be expensive! Like Cranky has mentioned, you'll need loads of RAM for the memory-intensive tasks - so get as much as you can. The rest of the specs such as power supply, hard drive, input peripherals, enclosure does not matter much IMO. Take a look at the threads seeking inputs for gaming rigs, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V those specs.

Take a look at toolius's signature - AFAIK he works in the audio industry and relies on high-end i7 systems for his work.