www.apple.com/powermac/

Computers are easy to build they are parts you buy and plug together.

The one you build will be infinitely better than any brand name shit you can buy - save maybe for a MAC but they are expensive.

The reason is simple: PCs are designed& built by purchasing agents who will kill to save a nickel. That makes the engineers sole job to tweak things to get the dog shit the purchasing agents bught to run together - it never does.


It's not like the old days when you had to go get a bucket of sand and make your own pure silicon for chips. First of course you had to build an UHV vacuum deposition chamber.

Bear one thing in mind: Pioneers get scalped. Don't be the first guy with the latest and greatest - stick to stuff that's been debugged by a thousand other people beofore you.

Start with the motherboard ASUS is always a safe bet.
You probably don't need a dual processor board. It's just fookin music.

AMD is a great cpu.

For memory and disk driver cards: Buy what the ASUS web site tells you will work with their board - after all they did the work of testing it, so you know it's OK.

Add an extra fan or to to your Case: more ventilation is always better.

Don't forget to put some heat transfer grease on the CPU/heat sink interface - a dab'll do ya.

Powersupply: More is better get the higher output unit - especially if you plan to run more than two hard drives, two CD / DVDs and a Zip drive and 1 floppy like me.

CD Plextor I reccommend against Dual drives get a DVD and get a CD .
Moniter: LaCie is great.

Video card: Unless you are a gamer don't spend more than $100. likely you can do great for under $60.00

Disk Driver cards: Proimise is sweet Esp., if you want to add a memory chipset to the driver card but - really - those cheap assed Maxtor cards work fine.

You'll need a card to get you in the web.

You might think of an extra card for USB ports. Likely the motherboard will have plenty but the cards are cheap and sooner or later you will need an extra USB port.

Memory comes in two flavors: Matched and unmatched. Most folks will never know the difference. Not that you know it from the shit they print trying to sell it to you.
More memory is better - to a point. then it gets unweildy and you need to accomodate it. Stay at or below a Gig and you'll be ok. A GIG who needs more? No me.

My first computer had a whole MEGABYTE of On Board RAM a 450 Meg HD and was - get this a ZERO WAIT STATE oh it was blazing.


Disk drives: Run of the mill EIDE drives are fine.
The SCUZZY and RAID drives have advantages most folks won't ever apreciate and they cost oodles more and you gotta load the drivers in the middle of the OS installation.

Get a fookin EIDE. Wetern Digital is fine. Hell they are all pretty much OK. Maxtor used to have a bad rep but I know folks who swear by 'em.

Unless you are insane with monster files think of an array of 40 Gig drives. They are cheap and if one breaks it won't break your heart.
Put all your shit on a 200 Gig drive and - well - all the eggs are in one basket. An expensive basket.

"I want a smoking fast Computer that will be able to run multiple programs and has a good sound card... That's pretty much all I know that I need."

That means you need to at least persue a G5, even a high end windows machine can't touch that performance. There's a reason you see Macs in the graphics production, arts and music industries.