The New Computer

Well, the old box just wasn't cutting it any longer. For those of you who may not know I'm a PC user and have been with the same Pentium 4 2.1 GHz for going on 3 years now. I've done countless projects on the old machine and she has seved me quite well. However it has become apparent that rendering times have become ridiculous and I am needing render submixes of groups just to be able to progress on larger projects.

With a lot of help from the good people at Micro Center, various forums (particularly Cakewalk's) and sites like this, there is now a bleeding quick (at leat by my stantdards) monster in my basement ready to devour the audio insanity I am about to barrage it with.

Brief Specs:

• Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.8GHz
  
• Intel D975XBX2 Extreme Desktop Board
  
• 4GB RAM
  
• 10,000RPM System Drive 100GB
  
• 750GB project drive
  
• 300GB sample drive
  

Building it was a bit of a daunting task but luckily I was not alone. My father and I took a few days to put it together. His experience goes back to when a 3.5" floppy drive cost about as half as much as what was spent on this entire project. This however was a new animal even to him. Of course when we were done building, getting XP (yes XP, we ain't touching vista yet) installed was quite a mess. Apparently when installing a fresh OS on a machine that is otherwise blank the only way to get the OS to install is to boot off of a floppy drive. WTF!?! Luckily my dad was able to donate a spare drive he had lying around and problem solved. Now the thing runs like a dream.

The one bump in the road is that the old single processor has a fairly large long term project working on it. I could just role the entire project over to the new machine but there are a few important plug ins in the project that I don't have on the new one. Plus, the idea of changing horses in mid stream just kind of irks me. If it were just a recording session I would do it but this is a fairly involved composition and sound design project.

If anybody would like to share experiences of building their own machine please do in the comments section. I would like to hear about it.