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Hello, I fell upon the forum 4 days ago and have been reading and searching many posts. It helped me narrow down very much what I am looking for but I remain with some questions. I am very new at music production.

I am aiming to build a dedicated DAW mainly to produce house/electronic music. I will be doing no physical voice or instrument recording. Here is what I have as a PC.

Intel E6750 2.6ghz Dual-Core
(i was going to overclock until I read that increased fan noise would cause noise in my audio so I am now opting to stay stock)
Gigabyte mobo with 4gig DDR2 RAM
HD RADEON 4850 for GFX
and and upgrade to a small SSD drive for OS and Software
OS WIN XP PRO 32Bit (which from my understanding means only 3.5gig of ram will be available)
Cubase, Ableton Live 8
Added will be Yamaha HS50M's for monitors, an Axiom MIDI Controller Keyboard and one or two more MIDI controllors/drum machine.

I would follow by reading threads on stripping windows xp down for music productivity.

I picked XP 32bit because of my hardware and maximum compatibilty, stability.
Opted away from PT after reading user comments about extra cost for plugins and vst wrapper, but I wonder if this is a mistake. I am also thinking that when I can afford it, I would upgrade to a Mac Pro to than mainly use Logic and Ableton on the side.

My questions are;

Is this set-up powerful enough for the type of music and recording I want to do? I suppose I would never pass 14 simultaneous tracks. Considering it will be dedicated and stripped down with an SSD drive for operating software.

Do I really need to invest into a soundcard? If so what are my best options in all price ranges for this type of strictly midi, digital audio electronic music.

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anonymous Thu, 07/22/2010 - 02:02

Sorry I forgot an important question, If I was to use a fanless heatsink to overclock (I know one of which produces great results) hence not needing to increase speed on any of my other fans, reducing total fan noise, would it still be unrecommended to overclock for x amount of reasons on the music production side of it? I know how to set up all the BIOS parameters to have a stable overclocked system running at 3.4ghz so that would not be an issue for me.

TheJackAttack Sun, 07/25/2010 - 18:29

Overclocking is for gamers. Overclocking has little relevance to professional audio recording other than it makes the whole system less stable. Your comment about 32 bit for stability is also erroneous. There is nothing inherently more stable about 32bit vs 64bit in today's world of DAW's. To finish off, I would not recommend building a machine based around a Core 2 Duo at this point in the technology time line. You need to start with an i7-720 (or faster) and go from there. Shooting yourself in the foot with older technology right from the get go is counterproductive.

Good luck.

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