building a new multi use machine mainly for sound recording

[Ullmann]

My first post! I've been reading through this website over the past week and have now formulated a rough idea of what there is to be done. Let me explain.

 

I have been borrowing a macbook from a friend, to plug into a external firewire soundcard(focusrite sapphire), which supprise supprise, crashes when using windows. I had initally planned on buying a macbook myself, but found that it had unavoidable limitations, for harware reasons. So I need more power *mwhahaha* *ahem* and well, the imac seemed too weak and the mac pro is way beyond my bank balance, secondhand or not. The funnything is, if apple actually did build a computer somewhere in between, I probably would have bought it!

 

The otherside of the coin is my broken pc. I've got a case, a very good 650w power supply, dvd drive, that i know works. I've been needing to get my home computer working, for films games and word processing. I also work with photoshop and plan on doing a little video editing.

 

SO,

I have now a rather broad brief as to what is required of this computer. My priority is my music recording, I need it to be 100% functioning for this(while I will be using my external soundcard I shall e using the onboard soundcard too) I'm pretty much set on buying a q9550 processor. For reliability I had considered the gigabyte ep35 ds4, but the lack of pci express 2 seems to limit my upgradability in the future, and I would like this computer to be able to have a decent graphics upgrade in a year or so. So I've now wondered about a x38 p45 or x48 motherboard. However this seems alot more problematic with macosx. If having such a motherboard will cause problems, I'd rather stick with the p35. Nonetheless, like with many of my problems, its not cheaper, just older, which is a little anoying.

 

The other question is regards graphics cards. the 8600gt is recomended for stability, but for the same price i could get the 8800gt, or 9600gt even a 9800gt. Usually when building a computer I get as much bang for my buck as I can. As I said, this is a dual boot pc, with the aim of running vista with games. I'm not a massive gamer but I'd like to be able to play games in good graphics. Also, I'm planning on buying one of those hans g 28" monitors and running at 1900 resolution, so a speedish card would make quite a difference.

 

To conclude, my main aim of this project is to build a computer that can run osx with my focusrite soundcard, garageband (plus other recording software) and is stable. This will also be my home pc(I don't have a tv) going through a very large monitor and i'm keen for it to run games as well as possible. So what motherboard should I go for, which should I really look outfor. The ep35 ds4 has many good comments and seems one of the most stable motherboards. The impression I get is the problems are due to macos being solely written for macs outdated hardware, such as new chipsets on the motherbaord and graphics cards. Does this mean that as macs become updated in the future, so will this problems vanish? Do we know which chipsets mac will use in the future? My point being, will these problems with new chipsets get better with time as osx becomes updated to recognise the newer technology? Perhaps in that case , a p45 motherboard for example, maybe problematic now,but in a couple of months or a year shall be recognised by osx. My fear is that in fact apple will leapfrog the current technology and go straight to intels new processor design, which afterall is just round the corner. This thought makes a p35 motherboard very appealing! Any help and advice on this matter will be greatly appreciated.

Tom

 

edit-I'm looking at buying the gigabyte ga ep45 ds3 from ebay, would this make a wise choice? Does anyone know if the sound issues with this mothership have been resolved?are there any questions regarding its stability? are there any confirmed cases of firewire working?