There's little difference between the two except cost, but I personally have had better results using Intel CPU and chipset for an audio workstation. I stress this is personally, and plenty of other people here will recommend AMD

How much are you thinking of spending? That's the main question you need to answer. Hardware choices fall into place once you know that.

On soundcard choice... search this forum. There's been at least one excellent thread on this subject

Finally dual monitors is a matter of preference. If you've got money to burn and space to spare there's no reason not to. There's no doubt that it can speed up your working if used correctly, but I'd personally consider it as a "nice to have" and would first consider spending the money on the soundcard / computer.

I just did this recently. I would recommend it. When you don't have MS word or internet or anything non-music related, the computer runs a hell of a lot better.

Get a pentium chip though. I use a p4 1.8 with 512 ram and a 40GB hard drive with an 8MB casing. I am thinking about getting a second monitor. It means you can have reason on one screen and cubase on the other, so you don't have to continually flip back and fourth. 2 x flat screen = expensive though. I managed to get everything for about US$650 cos i know someone.

Get Windows 2000 professional service pack 2. Or XP if you want. You need either 2000 or XP to run Cubase SX.

Oh, and you'll need a good sooundcard as well. Something with its own Asio/Asio2 drivers. M-Audio are good. Depends on how many ports you want. If I could do it again, I would get a delta 10/10 and a 4x4 midi interface. But that's me.

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1 out of every 4 people in this country are mentally disturbed. Look at your 3 closest friends. If they seem okay, then you're the one.

i recently bought a new pc, p4 2.4ghz with 1024mb of mem. both reason and cubase sx work fine.
i wasnt sure on what sound card to get yet, so i just bought the cheapest one they for the time being.
i thought about running 2 monitors (still am), but i couldnt be arsed at the moment.. little short on space too.

Robert makes a good point... 1Gb memory is recommended (that's what I've got...)

If you're running Cubase AND Reason, you NEED 512Mb memory, but 1Gb is of course better

I would like to add something here. I recently picked up a hard drive with an "8 mb" buffer and this thing zooms. Most hd's have a 2 mb buffer, and even though that doesn't sound like there is much difference, the 8 mb 7200rpm drive performs like a 10,000rpm drive (numerous articles have evidence of this), the 2mb drives perform like a 7200rpm.

So, getting the 8mb is close, and in some cases, better than getting a SCSI drive, and a fast drive can make a ton of difference in the performance of your PC. If you determine you don't quite need a gig of ram, I would say get less (like 770 or so)and get a faster 8mb buffer drive (they aren't much more than the 2mb. This is the best upgrade I've ever had for my computer, so I just wanted to share it.

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Business is very food.

I use RME's Hammerfall HDSP 9652 sound card and here's what they wrote about their reference PC and the hardware they used. This may not suit your specific needs but they provide very useful decision making information.

Standard PC
http://www.rme-audio.de/english/tec...fpc_p4std03.htm

Professional PC
http://www.rme-audio.de/english/tec...fpc_p4pro03.htm


In terms of hard drives, I would get two 8mb cache IDE HDDs and set up a raid 0 (Striping) on them. What striping does is, the data is broken down into blocks and each block is written to a separate disk drive. I/O performance is greatly improved by spreading the I/O load across many channels and drives. Best performance is achieved when data is striped across multiple controllers with only one drive per controller. It's recommended for video/audio production and editing.

ok thx all!

atm i'm thinking of getiing a AMD Athlon 2200XP, Asus A7N8X mobo, 80GB HD, 2x 256DDR Twinmoss (dual ddr) and just one monitor

i'm gonna buy it @ tones.be or funcomputer.de

don't know yet...

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vylix.be

Go with 2 monitors. It makes Cubase so much smoother. Project on monitor 1, mixer on monitor 2. I could never go back. And I would recommend Windows XP - it's rock solid and there's loads of tweaks you can do for a DAW.

What about a dual processor system?

I have an Athlon XP1800+, 1gig of PC2700 DDR, 7200 Segate Baracuda HDD and an M-Audiophile 2496. I've never had any problems with this system and I certainly push it to its limits. Sometimes I have 20 or so vstis running (mostly samplers, but usually several synths too) and on each channel I typical have 3-4 effects running.

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"To that guy, who asked me to sign this piece of paper saying that I’m number one… thumbs up to you man!!!" - Ferry Corsten

ok this is what i'm gonna get:

motherboard: Asus A7N8X (agp 8x, nforce2 chipset, dual ddr, ...)
cpu: AMD Athlon 2200XP @ 1800Mhz
ram: 2x 512DDR Twinmoss 333Mhz
hd: Maxtor 80GB 7200rpm 8mb cache
soundcard: don't know yet
vga card: something with twinview i think a Geforce 4 mx or something

does it seems allright?

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vylix.be