Time for a New PC.
July 17, 2009 – 8:19 pmRecently I purchased a Clavia Nord Lead 2 and I love it. The only snag is that I want to integrate it with Ableton Live and other synths, but I just don’t have a beefy enough PC. So it seems I need to build a new PC before I can really get any recording done.
Why don’t I just buy a prebuilt Dell or maybe switch to a Mac? Well first of all my hacker ethos won’t let me buy a pre-built PC. It’s a little like a gearhead leaving there car stock. I like to be in control of all the various aspects of my PC. I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a mac. I could run all three OSes on it, but not only does it run in to the first problem of being a pre-built machine out of my control, its also very expensive.
The goals of my new PC are music production and gaming. Though I’m a Linux guy, I’m pretty sure I’ll be running Windows. The games I like (Warcraft, etc.) play best on Windows (though with a beefy machine and hardcore video card, WoW will probably play fine under Linux) and Ableton Live (my music production platform of choice) only works FULLY on Windows. Do I run Windows 7 or the evert faithful XP? Not sure. Probably Windows 7 if it’s as good as people are saying it is.
Since I’m laid off, I need to watch our spending. But I’m sure I have enough things laying around that could be sold I could probably raise the cash easily.
I need to plan a budget and pick out parts. Motherboard and chip technology has changed so much since I built my last machine it’s silly.
I do know that this time around, all my parts will be bought off the net. No more running up to Frys to get RAM.
2 Responses to “Time for a New PC.”
Just some random thoughts from your friendly neighborhood Mac advocate…
The price is often a sticking point for some people, but I usually ramble on about total cost of ownership (maintenance, repairs, etc.) being lower, how if you were to get a PC with the same specs and parts, the price isn’t very different after all, etc. But I’m sure you’ve heard those all before. And, yes, being able to run just about any OS I like on the system is big selling point. Both my home computer and my laptop can boot into either the Mac OS or Windows, I can run Windows in parallel with the Mac OS (Parallels or Fusion), I can also run the Classic Mac OS in a virtual machine, and if I felt the urge, I could install various flavors of Linux on it as well (although mucking about with the Console and reveling in the BSD-based goodness of the core system usually gets me over that).
I also built a Mac from scratch before, just to prove to people it could be done. Mind you, this was at the tail end of the clone days, so I was able to procure the case/mobo from a UMAX S900 and build everything into that. It’s a little more difficult these days to do something like that from the ground up, but modern Macs are still highly customizable. Besides the options Apple gives you, all the parts are fairly standard, so you can modify/swap to your heart’s content. My last Mac I decided to install a spare ATA ZIP drive I had around into the second optical bay (which did require the use of a dremel to carve out space for the cable, which justified the effort–what’s a good upgrade that doesn’t require power tools?); this one I’ve stuffed with spare HDs, and so on.
And, yes, it always easier to find cheap parts online. Fry’s = teh evilz.
End rambling…now.
By Paul Auerbach on Jul 21, 2009
I’m pretty sure that the machine I build will be all Intel (with an Nvidia graphics card) so I can put OSX86 on it. Linux is really great, but until more commercial companies start producing software for Linux, I’m sort of short-changed in the pro-audio department.
At least OSX has WoW so I’m all set. :)
By Ben on Aug 4, 2009