I would like to see what PC configurations work well with Vegas 3. I am wondering whether to use an older Pentium III with Vegas 3 or should I look into a new pentium 4?
My other question is do the newer Celeron processors that are faster than the old P3 work ok with Vegas 3 users?
What type of work do you plan on recording and what are your expectations and budget?? Below is my current main rig that is getting a little long in the tooth (It's a little over a year old) but it is Very stable besides an occasional zoom bug.
My Old DAW has an old Supermicro MB, 512 Ram, PIII 600, Win 2k, Motu 2408, Generic SCSI card w/10K Cheetahs for Apps and Audio. It was actually very stable and I used to get what I thought was ample track plug in count on it. Track 16, OD 8 more and get quite a few plugs running once the buffer was kicked up to a mix level, although most of my reverbs are hardware based.
The celeron D processors, while benefiting from the increased frontside bus, has the same256k L2 cache as almost every P3 (aside from the tautalin, which I believe has a 512k L2 cache), so it should be more powerful than an aging p3, chances are that it is more powerful. HOwever you should be aware that for the same price as a new celeron D with the 533mhz fsb, you can get a P4 with the 533mhz fsb, it will have at least 2x the L2 cache, if not 4x (if you find a 533mhz fsb prescott, they have 1M L2 cache) what I'm getting at, is that the L2 cache is extreemly crucial, it will determine how complex the instructions, that the cpu performs, are. Personally, I'd rather go for the P4, if only for the L2 cache, but also because the P4 was designed for numbercrunching, and processing algorithms in workstations, where as the celeron family has always been intended for the family desktop