One Of My PCs Died

[He's Dead Jim]

Well, the title says it all,

I had an old AMD XP2100 on an ASUS A7V233, running XP Tiny

I was using this specifically to run soft synths such as Korg Legacy Collection, Native Instruments B4, etc etc...

So the machine has never been stable, but never a big deal for such minimal use,

But It finally died on friday night, wont boot, loops when trying to fdisk etc, so its really old gear

No problem I have another two machines to sub up for that stuff, one of which is my all round/multi puropse desktop.

So I will build a new desktop to replace,

I havent done such a fresh build before, where should I start, barebones/bundle/amd/intel/

I'll need a board, case, hdd, ram, psu, new opitical/dvd drive,

What else, dedicated soundcard? graphics?

Some starter suggestions would be appreciated, and hopefully there will be some stores doing discounts soon???

[neoadorable]

my advice overall is to wait because you're on the verge of some new cool tech and standards coming out, it's not like months and months or years of waiting, and it sounds like you have other machines to use right now. Otherwise, a Phenom II X4 CPU with 8GB RAM, Radeon 6850 or GeForce GTX 560 graphics card, ASUS M4 AM3 motherboard (any of them, they're all good), 500-600W Enermax or Seasonic power supply, and a 1TB hard drive will be more than plenty from what you describe as your uses.

[He's Dead Jim]

Thanks :)

Would I be best with an Solid State HD?

[ARchamps]

SSD's are pretty awesome. There is more competition now and the drives are becoming more reliable! There are new processors coming out (Intel IvyBridge) and GPUs (AMD 7000s and NVIDIA 600s). If you can't wait, you cannot go wrong with an Intel Sandy Bridge (if you have the budget). My PC (in my sig) cost me about $1000 CAD.

[RATiO]

neo im interested why you never reccommended a dedicated sound card since he mentioned he uses vst instruments? in my experience on board sound has never handled these very well

[HyBry]

What are you planning to replace, the machine that died - AMD XP2100 or the all round, multi purpose PC?

I think the suggestions would be different cosidering the use. If you replace the XP2100 with any quad core AMD then it would be a good improvement. There would be no need for GPU, as you probbably don't have one very powerful in there now so on-board should be enough. Overall you could build a cheap machince.

As for sound card it depends on your speakers and use. The on board audio is decent but if you can take advantage and apreciate then sound card would not hurt.

[RATiO]

Yeah something like a radeon 5670 would do if youre not gaming and using it for audio purposes. I'm guessing youre using additional software to the VSTs such as cubase/reason? These may need some gpu power but not much