Building my own new PC...

006 said:
Besides, what is the difference between Opteron and the x2 4200? Anything *major*, or is it mostly personal preference?
Opterons overclock better, and they have 1 MB of L2 cache, while the X2 4200+ has 512k of L2 cache (X2 4400+, on the other hand, also has 1 MB of L2 cache).
 
Well..hmm. Is there a dual-core Opteron a little faster than 1.8gHz? I didn't realize the cache on the 4200 was 512.

~006
 
Just wanted to state that there are speed benefits from using a RAID setup... been there... had a RAID 1 configuration that I had to break up because my RAID controller doesn't like my sound card... and I'm still bummed about it... and it's not only noticeable in tests, but in real world use as well... especially working with large streaming files (audio, video)... try mixing a 12 minute 70+ channel 24/41 song with and then without RAID... it's like working on a 486 vs. a Pentium 3...
 
the PC my band is using sports an ASUS motherboard (can't remember the model) that we've been extremely pleased with...we went with the p4 rather than the athlon tho, and no complaints there either; we are going to upgrade from 512 ram to a gig here soon tho

and a big +1 on the seperate harddrive for audio (or other storage) files...we've got two 80 gig hd's on ours, the storage one is currently 80% full (big dvd project and a dozen recording sessions) yet she still runs as good as new