new equipment

whr wrote on 12/4/2003, 10:50 AM

I am going to purchase a new pc for my media work. I do primarily audio but intend to get more involved with video as well. I am looking for suggestions on motherboards, ram, video capture cards, and 8 in/ out sound cards (preferably rackmount). I use primarily Vegas and Soundforge, as well as Cakewalk for midi sequencing.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Comments

Cold wrote on 12/4/2003, 6:25 PM

Budget?
Steve S.

ScottW wrote on 12/5/2003, 5:54 PM

Well, I'll share what I've built - so far I'm quite pleased with it:

SOYO P4I875PDragon 2 Platinum MB with a 2.8GHz P4 w/Hyperthreading and 800MHz FSB

512MB RAM (soon to be 1GB) ; two 256MB PC3200 DDR in order to take advantage of the dual channel MB capabilities)

Koolance case for water cooling (CPU, VIdeo, Northbridge and 5 internal disk drives)

five 60GB 7200 RPM IBM/Hitachi drives, 4 of them in a Raid 0 set; two 120GB 7200 RPM 8MB cache IBM/Hitachi e.Sata drives (in Highpoint external enclosures), again in a raid 0 set (using a Highpoint 4 port sata PCI controller rather than the MB sata, since I couldn't get the onboard controller to work correctly). So I've got a little over 1/2 terrabyte of storage.

Matrox P750 video card

M-Audio Delta 1010LT

Canopus ADVC1394 Capture card

Sony DVD+R/+RW flashed with Ricoh firmware (so I don't remember the exact Sony model, but this is going to be replaced soon with a Pioneer A06 burner).

The system was built over time, so I didn't feel the $$$ crunch all at the same time. For example, the 1010LT and e.Sata drives are recent additions; up until now I'd been using the onboard sound and making do with the storage I had.

Rogueone wrote on 12/6/2003, 8:38 AM

My system used to be used primarily for gaming, however the video aspect is kind of taking over. :-) My system does quite well for my usage, and here's what I've got:

Asus A7V8X mainboard w/Athlon XP 2500+ w/Barton core
1 GB of Crucial PC-2700 RAM
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Maxtor 120 GB HD w/8meg cache
Hitachi 80 GB drive on RAID controller (RAID 0 selected; it keeps the video drive off of the primary & secondary IDE channel, since both have a HD and CD drives)
LeadTek VC100 capture card (composite sources)
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum
Cheiftech Dragon Case (Nice and tall, plenty of room for expansion for internal drives)

My system has been upgraded several times over the last year, but a lot of good deals on hardware can be found on the internet.

Rogue One

whr wrote on 12/6/2003, 10:13 AM

Thanks for the input. Sorry I left off the budget. I am hoping to keep it at a $2000 cap but am more concerned with getting the right hardware and upgrading my software. I currently use Vegas 3c and will upgrade that. I've been using a gadget labs 8/24 rackmaount soundcard that I have been very happy with but will probably change for the sake of getting the best performance out of XP pro.