Music Studio/Gaming Rig: Help!

[Dr. Mallori]

Hey all, new recruit to eGO here, so a quick hello to everyone is in order

I'm Dr. Mallori, and besides recently getting my groove back in TF2 and Day of Defeat, I spend about 90% of my free time making music! My PC is a senior citizen at best, with an AMD Athlon 3000+ 2.2 GHz, 2 GB of RAM, and an AGP video card, so I've been fooling around with the help of a more hardware-savvy friend trying to build a nice studio PC for around ~$800 that could double as a decent gaming rig as well.

The main focus is the studio part: recording, running virtual instruments, and post-processing through a relatively large number of plug-ins, mostly CPU-heavy stuff. But of course, I'm a gamer, too!

The result so far is this: http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=14061146

Now the fun part: the caveats!

1. 
   The sound card I will be using is http://www.emu.com/products/product.asp?product=9872 . While it currently works amazingly under Windows XP32, it has limited/barely functional driver support in Windows 7, and even less functionality in 64-bit. So if I stay with Windows XP 32-bit it will use..
2. Less RAM! AFAIK, you need 64-bit to detect the full 4 gigs of RAM, but to be honest I'm not sure the 768 MB I'll be missing will make that big of a difference in performance. Regardless, I dunno if I should bother with dual channel RAM if I'm only going to be using ~75% of it?
3. Since it's a quad-core processor, and I would theoretically be using Windows XP for full sound card support, would XP be able to take advantage of the multiple cores?
4. I know nothing about cooling, and realize it's a smaller motherboard, so any advice on that would be great.

Any help with this is appreciated, because when it comes to PC hardware I end up like this appropriate smiley: :facewall:

For your health!
-Dr. Mallori

 

[Simon]

I personally would recommend a macbook or imac for making music. Theres lots of great software on it, and its great for media!

 

[Dr. Mallori]

I personally would recommend a macbook or imac for making music. Theres lots of great software on it, and its great for media!

Yeah, Mac was definitely my ideal choice. I love the GUI and it works great with ProTools. But alas, I am a poor college student and can't drop like $2k on a sexy, beastly Mac powerhouse.

 

[Passerby]

what kinda of DAW are you working with, cubase, pro tools or something else.
and what are you using for the audio interface a 003 or mbox or you got something different.


and XP works fine with quads it just cant do 64bit.

 

[Dr. Mallori]

what kinda of DAW are you working with, cubase, pro tools or something else.
and what are you using for the audio interface a 003 or mbox or you got something different.


and XP works fine with quads it just cant do 64bit.

The DAW would probably be either FL Studio 9 (having used FL for about 6 years now) but I might use Ableton Live as well.

As for the interface, the setup is a bit weird. I'm not using a breakout box or anything but rather a Mackie 802 mixer (http://www.zzounds.com/item--MAC802VLZ3) to the sound card for recording.

My main tools are the AKAI MPD24, a MIDI trigger/controller that I use essentially as a sampler (I do primarily sample-heavy music), and my turntable. The plan would be: (crudely drawn)

         __[U](recording)[/U]______
         V                 |
   [PC/DAW] ------------> Mackie -------> monitors/headphones
       ^                     ^
       |                     |
    Akai (MIDI)      Turntable/Microphones

 

[Passerby]

ah i was just wondering about your setup i work in the music industry myslef but i mostly work with pro tools HD at the studio and at home o have a pro tools LE system based on a digi 003 rack+ and a mac pro, but i still use ableton live live once in a while when im just trying to get ideas down.