Benefits of building a recording PC vs. buying "off the shelf"

[nwright]

I've been mulling over getting a new machine for editing/mixing (I use a laptop for recording and mixing at the moment), mainly to be able to increase my CPU resources.

My current laptop is a Core 2 Duo with 3GB Ram running Windows 7 64 bit, and my interface is a Profire 2626. With my buffer settings at 4096 (mixing), I can run about 35-40 plugins (8 instances of drumagog, probably 12-15 instances of Rcomp, 4-5 reverbs, 2 or 3 SIR plugs, plus various modulation effects plugs and EQ's)

Anyway, What would be the benefit of building a computer for audio recording vs. buying an HP, Dell, etc. ALL THINGS BEING RELATIVE?

I've priced out buying the parts to build one and compared that to off the shelf offering from HP and Dell and honestly there isn't much savings, IMO. Maybe 100 bucks difference. Other than perhaps saving money, what other advantages are there to building? I know you get to select each component, but I feel I can find off the shelf systems with specs similar enough to selecting my own components that even that aspect is covered...

The system I'm wanting to buy/build would revolve around an Intel i7 processor with 1GB video card, probably 8GB Ram, 1TB hard drive (plus running externals). I already have a 23" and a 24" monitor.

Advice, thoughts?

 

[iHate]

Well I think the advantages are you get higher quality parts, parts that you get to pick. You'll know the quality and brand of the mobo, graphics card, ram, PSU, hard drives, when building yourself. And since you built it, it is easier to trouble shoot problems. Most parts you buy yourself will also have a much better warranty than the standard 1 year from the manufacturer, like some WD hdd's are 5 year warranty'd.

Just out of curiosity, which Core 2 Duo is in your laptop? I'm looking to buy a laptop, and all the plugins you are able to run is what I would like to run.

 

[deLuther]

Recording PC with 1 Gb Video... maybe I would choose something not so powerful and fan-less to reduce acoustic noise.
Also powerful video will heat your case inside
I, personaly, assemble my last PC myself, for the same price (I`m in Russia) I got more powerful PC than stock ones

 

[nwright]

Well I think the advantages are you get higher quality parts, parts that you get to pick. You'll know the quality and brand of the mobo, graphics card, ram, PSU, hard drives, when building yourself. And since you built it, it is easier to trouble shoot problems. Most parts you buy yourself will also have a much better warranty than the standard 1 year from the manufacturer, like some WD hdd's are 5 year warranty'd.

Just out of curiosity, which Core 2 Duo is in your laptop? I'm looking to buy a laptop, and all the plugins you are able to run is what I would like to run.

I have an HP DV9235nr, purchased in Feb of '07 the week Vista rolled out. It's coming up on 3 years old, but it's still a great computer and has been rock solid. I've even dropped it about 6 feet onto straight concrete and other then breaking a screw bracket internally on the lid (doesnt affect anything), it works perfect.

It has 2 HD bays, so I have the OS drive and then a seperate drive I record to (and then back up on externall HDD). My biggest issue now is wanting to run lower latency and more plugins at mix time. Currently, with the profire 2626 if I want to monitor the inputs for tracking, I can't do much. 4 tracks of guitars with PODfarm and Boogex running on each plus SSD running on a MIDI track at 128 samples gets a little bogged down, which sucks. I usually switch 4096 sample buffer, which gets me pretty much everything I want, but if I get close to 35-35 tracks and 40+ plugins, I'm getting some pops and skips. While I can easily work around with bouncing and whatnot, I'd really love the convenience of not having to worry about it, lol.

Also, I recently switch to Win7...While everything is running great, my input and output latency was initially about 4ms at 128, which was fine...But lately my input is about 4, but output latency is like 45ms...Don't know why. So even at 128 (or 64), the output latency is keeping me from live monitoring so I can't track through PODfarm. I don't know if it's a win7 thing (as it did not do this last week, just started this week), or if I did something I'm not really aware of.

In comparing directly a Dell XPS to components at Newegg, building was actually more expensive than buying stock. Same goes with HP's...The only off the shelf computers probably more are alienware and rain recording comps.