This has definitely been answered before...

I would either go for the Asus P4PE with a 533Mhz FSB CPU and PC2700 DDR 333 memory...

Or the Asus P4G8X with 1GB PC2100 DDR 266 and a 533Mhz FSB...

Either one will be great!

Hard drives...either Maxtor or Western Digital with the 8 MB cache on them for the OS and Data drives.

Windows XP Pro

Matrox Video card for audio based systems

Case, whatever makes you think...sexy! lol

Power supply...Enermax or Antec...highest rating possible...the more power the better

Opus :D

thank you opus - sorry for the redundancy.

If you are on a budget I would start looking for an AMD processor and MoBo rather than a P4. I am running 3 different ECS K7S5A Mobo's with different speed Athlon XP's (from 1.33GHz to 2400+). These are about the least expensive combinations you can get and they are rock solid. I am using RME Hammerfall and Digi96 soundcard and I achieve extremely low latencies (128 samples).

Also, buy Seagate HD's, they are the quietest. The suggested WD with 8MB are faster than necessary for a premium price. I have never even gotten close to HD bottlenecks with the 2MB buffer on the Seagates that I run. The WD's are a good deal louder (although still usable).

The Matrox 550 seems to be a standard "audio graphics card". I personally own the Radeon VE and that one works also very well and I think it is cheaper.

WinXP Pro is a waste unless you need multiple CPU support which is not well supported by most applications yet. Get the XP Home OEM version ($85 or so). Win98SE also works but needs to be finetuned for audio.

Hope this helps,

MisterBlue.

mister blue - thanks for the reply.

the AMD route sounds good to me :-) hadnt looked into it too much before...