You guys seem to have a pretty good “discussion” going on here… 
I’ll only add a couple comments if I may?
Back when I was looking for a dedicated DAW box, I browsed all the pro-audio recording forums and such and settled on a configuration that was extremely popular on the Digidesign Users Conference (DUC). Well, I ended up NOT buying a ProTools LE system (thank goodness) but I did decide to use the suggested PC hardware as a bunch of guys had reported great success with it. Sooo… being the tight-wad that I am, I scoped out all the online parts suppliers and came up with a parts cost of approximately 685 bucks. Next, I checked with an online PC builder recommended to me by a guy from the DUC. They would ship the same PC (different case, but who cares as long as it’s quiet and quality) to my door for 719 dollars! This included the parts manufacturers warranty PLUS another YEAR. So I sez to myslef… “Self, you could order up all this crap and spend a couple or three hours putting it all together and another hour loading XP… OR you could order this thing, yank it out of the box and be recording in about fifteen minutes. For what? 30 bucks!” No-brainer man. I ordered the pre-built to my specs jobbie and have been patting myself on the back ever since.
Moral of story? IF you like geeking around, building your own stuff just for the “thrill”… then yeah, go for it. If your time is more valuable to you, look into the Mike Cressey’s of the webi-verse. You may find you come out ahead in the long run.
D
DISCLAIMER: This is not an advertisement or recommendation for ANYBODY or ANYTHING. Just a real-life accounting of my personal experience in the pursuit of DAW PC bliss…
PS Despite this box being several years old now… it’s still humming along just fine. Just for info…
ASUS A7V600 MOBO
AMD AthlonXP 3200+ CPU
1 GB Kingston PC3200 RAM
2 x WD 80 GB HD’s with 8 MB cache
1 LITE-ON CDRW/DVDRW optical drive
This same PC configuration records 20+ tracks of 24/44.1 audio every service where I used to go to church using a MOTU 24 i/o interface. It works flawlessly and sounds fabulous.
Moral of story? IF you like geeking around, building your own stuff just for the "thrill"... then yeah, go for it. If your time is more valuable to you, look into the Mike Cressey's of the webi-verse. You may find you come out ahead in the long run.
It is interesting because I recently participated in another, long DAW related thread on rec.audio.pro, where a lot of pro's with strong opinions on audio processsing reside.
The thread author had $2,000 that he wanted to spend on a DAW and other audio gear.
I simply pointed the guy to my web site where he could see the components I use and the "pro's" attacked me for being a vendor which I got kick out of.
In the same thread, I also mentioned that I use RAID-0 on my home DAW, and which I don't even recommend these days.
I got attacked for that.
It was vicious for a while.
One of the guys, whom later apologized to me, even called me a liar outright.
In the end, I believe that the "pro's" on rec.audio.rec end up convincing the guy to buy a Dell and stay away from high-end machines like the one's that I and others build.
Very interesting conversion indeed.
If you want to look at it, it's still current and it's called "PC Building Tips" - it has 250 posts.
Our corporate contract is with Dell… and it’s OK… as long as you want to run Office or whatever business apps and throw it in the dumpster when it takes a shite because Dell’s proprietary part costs more than a replacement PC from another manufacturer… UGH!
Well… it ain’t THAT bad. If it’s a hard drive gone ten-toes up, you’re OK. Get a new one and slap it in there… if it’s a MOBO… you ARE screwed. Period. Throw it in the dumpster… fill out a requisition and order a new box.
We’ve had to toss Dell boxes because the power supply took a dump! How stupid is that? They couldn’t use an industry standard power supply??? Sheesh… If the BIG KAHUNA would let 'em, our IT guys would be building custom boxes for everything. At lower costs and better reliability.
D
PS Did I say “Ugh” already? I thought so…
I use to work at ESRI and we probably had literally thousands of Dell machines. I rarely heard of any problems with them. I had 3 - 4 in the course of 10 years and they worked fine.
I did have problems with my wife’s laptop and it was a known issue. Dell fixed it for me even though it was out of warranty (although I had to complain hard to them before they did that).
But this is the whole reason, I recommend custom DAWs and using good components, i.e., to avoid the cheap component route Dell takes.
In the end I bought the HP a6220n.
I’ve alway had good luck with HP’s and this one has plenty of expansion possibilities.
I’ve already stripped it of all the bloatware, tweaked it for recording use, and am finally getting it to work with me…its all Sata drives and a Vista OS - which has some unpublicized quirks - but isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
If anybody is really interested here are a couple interesting bits of info:
Sata Drives:
the new Vista PC is all sata, so to access my old IDE drives, I purchased one of these.
Great little toy (cheap) and works perfectly.
Now I have a bunch of old HD’s I can use like floppies (funny).
Dual monitors:
I have now found that Vista will only allow ONE video card.
If the onboard card on your PC doesn’t support two outs and you want dual monitors, you’re out of luck.
I had to invest in a new video card…a cheap one with DVI and VGA outs which needed a DVI to VGA adapter since both monitors have VGA connectors.
It works pretty well but I can see the diff between the DVI monitor and the VGA one.
Other than those two issues, I haven’t really had any problems…yet.
I still haven’t tried burning anything, so we’ll see… I have a lot of things to try out.
thanx for all the discussion…
cliff
Yep - for $654.99 it’s hard to beat this HP a6620n.
I did check the spec’s on it and it’s a little “old” by current standards, so please realize this (this is exactly what Dell does).
For example, the PC2-5300 memory is slower - DDR2 800 and 1066 are the new speeds.
The FSB of 800 MHz is old - 1333/1066MHz are the latest.
I also prefer 2 hard drives, one for the OS and app’s and the other for data, but if a 400 GB drive works for you then great.
If it’s not too noisey, then you’re good to go with this machine.