this or that

[ramchandra]

A Sweetwater Creation Station or should I just build my own? Money is the issue.

[John Jeffers]

Building your own will usually be cheaper in terms of actual dollars spent. However, if you're not particularly experienced with building computers, the amount of time and frustration you could avoid buying a prebuilt system could be worth it. There's also the warranty factor. Building your own means that you need to be able to identify what part has failed, and deal with that part manufacturer directly. If you can handle the additional responsibilities of building your own, you will probably save some money.

[ramchandra]

Thanks man I never thought about the warrenty issue. I've built one before but it didn't do what I wanted. the track count was low, and processing effects was a bit of a task for that machine I think due to the chip set, but I'm pretty novice at this stuff.

Say I wanted to have two gigs of ram and 350 gigs of hard drive space. What motherboard and processor would you reccomend? and any other things you could think of that might make a good system. I'm running nuendo with an Apogee AD16x.

[John Jeffers]

If I was going to build my own right now, I'd go with the Core 2 Duo processor (aka "Conroe"). The "fastest processor" crown has been flipping back and forth between Intel and AMD for a while, but right now it seems to belong to Intel.

Check this out for motherboard and other recommendations. It's a long article with lots of technical detail, but if you can't follow it at least somewhat, then you probably shouldn't be building your own system.

[John Jeffers]

processing effects was a bit of a task for that machine I think due to the chip set

I'd think that the processor, memory, and disks would be the major factors impacting plugins, with chipset one of the less important factors. Chipset is rarely going to be a huge determinant on performance--certainly less than those three other things I mentioned. Where chipset more often becomes a factor is compatibility with other hardware, and upgrading.