Hi all,

My 4.5 years old PC kinda died on me,
and it was a limiting DAW back when it worked perfectly so I decided to upgrade my system.

I'm pretty low on funds, so I figured I can stick with my
1. old case
2. PSU(520W)
3. Graphics card(Nvidia 9500GT) [or use intel graphics that will come with the new CPU]
4. Hard Drives
5. Burner, Screens, Keyboard etc...

and just buy a new MotherBoard, CPU, and RAM.
What would you suggest to get for a budget of about 350$-400$ ?

Here's my current system:

PC:
CPU: Intel Core2 Duo E7300 2.66GHz
PSU: Core Elite ATX-520W
M-Board: Gigabyte G31M-S2L
RAM: 2X2GB DDR2 400Mhz
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 9500GT
Hard Drives: Western Digital: 1TB Black(WD1002FAEX), 500GB Green(WD5000AACS), 160GB(WD1600ADFD)
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64 Bit

Audio Hardware:
External Audio Interface: PreSonus FireBox
Amplifier: InterM PA-2000a
Mics: Shure SM57 & KSM27

This 'll do gigabyte mobo with firewire 8 gb ram and i5 at Newegg ..

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Intel Core i5-3350P Ivy Bridge 3.1GHz (3.3GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 69W Quad-Core Desktop Processor BX80637i53350P
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1st before you buy all that stuff , what brand Power Supply do you have , that might be why your PC died you might have a bad power supply .

I wrote in the previous post: Core Elite ATX-520W

Is Core the brand, because it seems to be a generic PSU if so and is most likely a piece of crap.

Also, you won't be able to plug in your old hard drive and it just work. You'll most likely need to reinstall your OS and software.

No problem with installing OS and software again.

A real dilemma is whether to go amd or intel, most ppl suggested i5, but there's some suggesting amd.

I think that's the no1 question for me to solve...

I think a good L3 Cache is important for my kind of uses...

If you look at most reviews/benchmarks, intel beats in benchmarks, and lightly threaded apps. The new line of FX chips seem to be an improvement, although the fx4xxx chip didnt please a lot of benchmarkers. The amd chips (under heavy workload) will draw more power than their intel counterparts.

Im building an amd system, havent recieved/assembled it yet. I dont care about 20+ fps in games, i also dont spend my time running benchmarks. But these are things for you to decide. There are plenty of benchmarks and reviews floating around for you to read up on.

Im not a fanboy, i used to buy mainly intel, i got burned a few times, i switched to amd years ago, and have been happy.

There is a sale on newegg right now, if you buy any Z77 (intel) motherboard, you get 8gb ram free, could leave you more room for better cpu. But you havent told us where you are ordering from, so newegg may be off limits for you.

Like others have pointed out, PSU! Its not the sexy part of the computer, but its important, and usually overlooked. I only find one site selling this "brand" in the philipines, so i cant find much info on it, but from the picture it appears to not be rated at all.

Reguardless of Intel/AMD choice you make, i would highly recommend a different PSU.

Heres a great list of psu manufacturers, and which to avoid, also there is info on how to determine who made rebranded ones. That place is full of a lot of helpful information in other sections as well.

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/323050.aspx

Intel if you can afford to go i5 otherwise it's a pretty tight toss up between i3 and AMD.

I echo the PSU concerns.

Even if he chooses FX-8350?

When it comes to the mobo, the differences I see are mainly in features like pci slots and stuff like that, is there any differnce in actual performence?

here are some of the mobos that were suggested to me:
Gigabyte Z77x UD2h
GIGABYTE GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 LGA 1155
"gigabyte or asus b75 mobo"
ASUS P8Z77-M LGA 1155 Intel Z77

Just wanted to add (in case you might not know) that if you want to use more than 4 BG of RAM, you do have to switch your host software to 64bit as well (and your plugins, unless you use jbridge or something similar, which can lead to problems, but will probably work well with most of the plugins).

Because the prices where I live are a lil' higher, I decided to go with i5 3470
since I don't intend to overclock, and the 0.2GHz differnce doesn't worth the 65$[where i live] from 3470 to 3570k.

So now I have a few more questions(Low noise is important):
1) The motherboard. I looked at the differences and could see features differnces,
non seemed crucial, but still I'm being told there will be a PERFORMENCE DIFFERENCE between different boards.
is that right?
2) Which PSU brands/models can I trust?
3) Which CPU fan brands/models can I trust?
4) Which RAM brands/models can I trust? (although if I go 2X4GB DDR 3 1600 and choose a good brand like kingston or crossair, it doesn't really matter that much exactly which I choose right? BTW - it doesn't matter if I get 1X8GB or 2X4GB right? almost no price differnce so I figure why not?)


@streifentier: already running 64bit, thanks.

Admittedly the last AMD chip I tested was the A10 5800 but it didn't do well against anything higher than an i3 and that was pretty much down to the shared cache/FPU bottleneck which seems problematic for audio processing. The 8350 doesn't do anything to resolve this so I'm not expecting any great leap forward in performance for audio rigs; I'll see if I can dig a chip up and bench it.

Is it 1992 and someone forgot to tell me? I haven't nearly the amount of motherboard benchmark articles like you used to back in the day. You should be concerned about motherboard STABILITY and configurability much more than performance. The jump from Core 2 to Ivy will be a huge jump alone. However, one BIOS setting off, and the whole thing can go from a rock solid DAW to barely suitable for web surfing. See what other people on the forums are using for specific motherboards first to get a better idea of a good mobo. At least then if you run into DPC spikes, you might be able to work around it... maybe.

Devon