Rain Audio PC's

[tehLORD]

Now im under pressure ! I feel its my duty to build my own.....I going to check out all the costs and bits tomorrow.


tehLord......how much do you reckon those bits you quoted would cost?

The same as the £800 I wrote down above

Go take a look at Ebuyer, they're generally the cheapest in my experience. If you're really worried about building, see if there's an independant PC shop nearby just in case. The only issues I've ever had with self builds are with faulty components, usually RAM. That's easily remedied though as you'll often be fine if you use only one out of the number of memory sticks you buy.

You'll have a motherboard that you need to attach the CPU and the CPU fan to. They generally go only one way and are fiddly rather than difficult to fit.

You'll have one or two hard drives that connect via sata cables. They can only go one way. Same with the optical drive.

You'll have memory sticks that can only go one way.

You'll have a graphics card that can only go in one of a couple of PCIe slots (doesn't matter which one as long as the card isn't in the way of something else in the case).

Slightly trickier is the PSU, but only because it looks more complicated than it is. You'll need to connect power cables to the optical drive and two hard drives, but the connectors are specifically shaped. Then you'll need to connect power to the motherboard. You will probably find that there are two connectors, one large one with 20 pins and one smaller one with 4 pins. Again, they can only go in one place and the PSU will probably only have one of each. Sometimes it will be one 24 pin connector that you may have to unclip into two parts. It'll be obvious when you see the connectors and the motherboard.

Lastly you'll need to supply power to the case fans, these are usually smaller power cables that will be obvious by their connections.

The only truly tricky part is connecting the case wires to the motherboard. It's not particularly tricky to understand, but they are usually tiny little connectors! There should be one for the power button , one for reset and as many hard drive activity lights as you need connected. I think that's it......

Some GPU's need power, but a fanless one for a DAW probably won't.

As long as it's all connected up properly, it should fire up first time, ready for your OS install. It's worth leaving the case open on first boot just so you can visually check all the fans are spinning up. And also check that the case fans are spinning in the right direction

edit - I just found this really excellent self build tutorial as well, in three parts.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPIXAtNGGCw

[spark240]

sorry but I dont really see it.....your spec there + £100 = £900.

The spec below from Inta is £920 and looks very similar, plus I get there aftercare?

Am I missing something..........this is likely ?



Project Black Tower Case

ASUS P8H77-V - Intel H77 Chipset

INTEL i7 3770 Ivy Bridge - Quad Core 3.4Ghz
Stock Intel CPU Cooler

16Gb DDR III 1333Mhz Kit (Requires - Windows 7 64Bit OS)

Nvidia GeForce 210 512Mb - Dual Head

1000GB SATA 7200RPM
1000GB SATA 7200RPM

Single DVD Writer

400w Ultra Quiet Power Supply

Black PS2 Keyboard & Mouse Set

Windows 7 Premium 64Bit
Acronis True Image Home

Inta Standard Care Plan

See less...

[tehLORD]

What you're getting there is a slightly last generation chipset. The reality is that it won't make much difference in terms of performance, but you may find it slightly harder to find suitable upgrade CPU's in say 3-4 years time.

If you self built with the same chipset you might save £100 or so, but as you say the aftercare and ease of them building it might be worth it for you.

Oh, and the system I specced had an SSD OS drive as well, which will mean a 5-10 second boot up time and snappier performance, but still with the same total amount of storage space. And a slightly more powerful PSU.

Actually, the one I specced IS better lol

[spark240]

Yeah....I noticed the SSD !

I have taken all of your points on board and thanks for sticking with it !

I am still not 100% either way but I will continue the search....

[tehLORD]

I think the prices are similar enough to choose between better after care (potentially) or better spec.

Better spec might not necessarily make much of a difference in how you work, you'll still be doing exactly the same thing with the machine as it's not monumentally better.

[spark240]

question.....if I opt to replace the 1000Gb program drive with SSD, the options are only 120Gb or 180Gb, why are these so small and how are they able to replace 1000Gb ?

[tehLORD]

The SSD drive will only be for the OS and your application installs. All your sample and project data gets stored on a separate oldskool hard drive. This way you don't have jumbled data streams where your computer is trying to run data for your running programs and streaming samples along the same bus.

The ideal solution would be to have an SSD for OS and programs, a 1TB drive for project data and another 1TB drive for samples etc. In reality it's cheaper to have a single 2TB data drive, and I run a single data drive now with no real issues. If you opt for 16GB RAM it's unlikely you'll be streaming project audio from a hard drive anyway as it can all sit in memory, which is much faster.

[HeartfeltDawn]

I built an Intel i5 system just before xmas. I got the i5 with fan, motherboard and 8Gb ram from Novatech as a bundle for £250 and then spent another £100 on a case, harddrive and DVD writer. The build took less than 15 minutes as modern boards don't use jumpers to set multiplier and clock speed, it's all auto. And there's no configuring master, slave or CS for drives anymore because all harddrives and optical drives are self configuring SATA.

Pretty sure when I built mine that the only thing I had to configure was the clock timings for the memory in the motherboard BIOS. Piss easy!

[spark240]

Ok...I have concluded that Rain are just too expensive for my requirements.

Scan....well , they are highly recomended but....again all prices look good until you add on the vat !

I am down to Inta Audio which is the spec I listed earlier, but oddly its now £899.

Checking bank for funds....