Hey there, I just bought all the parts today for a new computer that I will be using for music, HD video, 3d art, photoshop, etc. But still, some of the things I researched may be able to help you..

For recording music, you really don't need a TON of power. If you use a lot of plugins and such, having a good amount of RAM will help. 4 gigs is now the standard it seems... I just bought 8 gigs for $100 for my new build. Are you building an entirely new computer or reusing stuff from the old one?

An AMD will run you much cheaper, but I wanted a big upgrade from this computer which is only about 3 years old, so I went intel. I still feel like intel has its image for a reason. That being said, the new i5 / i7 processors are apparently beastly. Right now the i7 motherboards are a pain to get since they just came out with a fix (recall they had). The board I ordered sold out a minute after I finished the checkout. Anyways, if this is strictly for music you could easily get away with an i5 build and be more than happy. Even then it is probably more than you need though. As long as you don't get anything messing up with your presonus latency set on 2ms in the utility, I think you'll be fine.

As far as all of your other concerns.. power supply, CD burner, video card... what I usually do is just go to newegg and sort by 'best rating'. Often times these are the most popular items, and ones that end up winning the 'customer choice' awards. Had good luck so far with this method!

As far as a hard drive goes - I feel this is the most important. I just ordered a Solid State Drive, no spinning parts. MUCH faster than a 7200 rpm standard drive. But where you would pay 10 cents per gigabyte on a normal hard drive, you'll pay $2 for on an SSD. But they won't get scratched and will write extremely fast. I ordered a 120 GB model so that I can record my projects on there, then move them to another hard drive for storage. But as far as working speed, the SSD can't be beat. I'd at least look into it.

Remember you really don't need a powerful computer just for music. I know lots of people that do it off a laptop. If you have lots of plugins, you'll need some decent RAM. A fast enough processor to get a low latency on your interface. And a solid state hard drive would make for very fast reading / writing of your projects. Hope it helps some

That definitely helps. You really couldn't have explained what you did any better. Thank you for taking time out to read this thread and reply.

To ask about reusing the old parts is a great question. I was going to reuse the video card and hard drive. Now that you explained the Solid State Drive to me, I will just use the drive I have now as a back up. Also I thought my monitor was going bad because the screen would jump around and cut in and out. I have the monitor hooked up to another computer and it is perfect. I've been looking stuff up on Tiger Direct and occasionally taking a drive to Fry's Electronics. I will have to check out Newegg. It is always good to have multiple sources. Thanks for the advice about best ratings. That is a great idea.

You explaining I could have latency problems an i5 is a great help. I know you say it could work, but I'd rather be on the safe side. I think I had an i5 before. I had a few skipping problems when I had a lot of tracks playing at the same time. I use maybe 8-10 tracks for the drums, three tracks, sometimes four for the guitar, two, rarely three tracks for the keys, one bass track, and multiple tracks for vocals. I usually only use this many when recording Metal. When we record the softer stuff, we tend to keep it simple.

As far as the plug-ins go, I'm not really big on them. I use them from time to time when I need to. I just like to have a real sound. I know there are some realistic plug-ins. I just can't afford it.

Thank you for your help.