Lately, I’ve been doing
articles based on how cheaply I could put a music production computer for but
I thought it might be fun every once in a while to see how much it would cost
to put together a screamer without taking price into consideration. I’m not
necessarily going to buy the most expensive gear but I am going to focus on
speed and reliability.
First, our case—we are
building a machine that’s going to generate a lot of heat so we need to make
sure it’s adequately ventilated, quiet and gives us the most options as far
as peripherals, etc. It won’t hurt if it looks cool either. The
Antec P182SE
fits the bill nicely with 3-120mm fans and triple wall construction (steel,
plastic and a polished stainless steel exterior). It also has front panel USB
and Firewire and special engineering to isolate power supply heat from the
motherboard. It also has room for 2 more 120mm fans for a total of 5—$229.95.
Now—motherboard and
processor. I intend to use the
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66GHz
processer and since
there’s only one at $578.99, that pretty much wraps that up. The motherboard
has to be a LGA 775 type and I like to pair Intel motherboards with Intel
processors so we’re going to go with the
Intel BLKDG33FBC
with a 1066Mhz front
side bus and a maximum of 8GB of memory It has 3—PCI, 3–PCI express x 1 and
1–PCI express x 16 slots. It runs $103.99 and will support just about any LGA
775 processor intel makes so it will probably be the motherboard for our next
Intel budget machine. So far we’re up to $912.93, which is more than we spent
on the whole shebang last time.
Power supply—
Antec NeoPower NeoHE 550
550 watts—$99.99, CPU Cooler—Vigor Gaming CLT M2I 92mm Themal
electric cooler—$129.99, Memory 4 ea
GeIL 2GB, DDR2 800 Dual Channel memory
with heat spreader at $139.99—$559.96—Total so
far—$1702.87.
Hard Drives— Has to be
Hitachi—but we’re going gonzo here 1-
500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s
for $109.99 and a
1Terrabyte SATA 3.0Gb/s
for $359.99. CD–Burner Lite On 52X for $17.99 and a Lite On DVD
Burner for $41.99 Total—$2122.84
I would like to use 2
monitors so we’re going to add a video card from
DIAMOND
that has 2 DVI
outputs for $155.99 and 2
NEC 20.1” DVI monitors
at $359.99 each. What I like
about these is the stand seems to be taller than most so we won’t have to
hunch over to see them. We round everything out with a
Microsoft Silver & Black RF Wireless keyboard
and mouse for $64.99.—Total—$3067.80
While we’re at it, lets
go ahead and spring for a
Digidesign Digi 003 Factory Pro Tools LE Workstation
for $2195 and we’re in business for the paltry sum of $5258.80.
This doesn’t include everything else like mics and so on that we’ll need to start our studio but I'll
leave that for next month
