Cheap build for musician

I am building a pc for my house mate who will be using it mainly for working using pro-tools with his firewire m-powered sound card.

So far we have the case, psu and 4x 1gb sticks of pc-5300 ddr2 bought off these forums. With the cost of pro-tools and another £50 for an oem copy of xp home (pro tools doesn't play well with vista right now) there isn't much money left for the cpu and motherboard.

I'm currently thinking a g33 board for now as these have 4 ram slots, onboard graphics, firewire and appear to support 45nm cpus. Any other chipsets I should be looking out for? Looking at the Asus p5k-vm motherboard but wondering whether I can save £10 and go for something 965 based, I suspect this is a false economy though.

Cpu wise, having failed to persuade my house mate to go for an e4500, I'm looking at the e2xxx series ranging from 1.8 - 2.2ghz. There's about £10 between an e2160 and an e2200 in it but he's counting the pennies and is emphatic that he wont overclock. How well do these cpu's perform at stock and at these price points is it even possibly worth me looking at AMD?

Thanks

dodgybob

How about going for AMD,

Asus M2A-VM - I think there are some AM2+ boards floating around at this price as well so phenom could be a decent upgrade option later on.
5000+ black edition - unlocked multiplier making overclocking nothing more than a multiplier change but no HSF..

5000+ -same CPU with a HSF but no unlocked multiplier.

I have the black edition and that motherboard,clocked at 2.6GHz (stock) it easily comparable to my E6600 @ stock settings and it easily clocks up to 3.0Ghz with no effort what so ever :)

If you want to go Intel and still save some money. THe 630i motherboards are worth checking out along with the E2160. Just let down by two RAM slots and single channel not dual.

With no OC and price a constraint, AMD is more than competitive. I guess the 4400+ is about the same point as the E2160 (although staffsMike suggestions are superior), but motherboards tend to be cheaper. This is AM2+:
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

I found the Abit board I was thinking of
Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Only 2 memory slots!

very good point :embarrassed:

Thanks for the prompt and very useful responses :)

I'm almost certainly sold on AMD. In terms of power he can afford now it seems to win against Intel, particularly as a decent G33 board hovers over £60. The M2A-VM lacks firewire but at this price point a £5 firewire pci card makes sense to get round that issue. I know my housemate has specifically said he doesn't want to overclock but I'm going to run the black edition past him. It's a very different kettle of fish to most overclocking and I didn't realise they were so damned cheap.

I feel I may have jumped the gun slightly when we bought the ram, it's 4 sticks of 667mhz stuff which limits me to 4 slot boards and AM2 X2s are meant to work better with 800mhz stuff but I doubt there is too much of a performance hit. He's upgrading from an xp2600+ with 768mb of pc2100!

I'm going to avoid asrock as a friend of mine used to work for returns at aria and asrock were returned in much greater volumes than any other make. At least power to the board wont be an issue as I'm selling him my s12-430 cheaply.

Seem to be a lot of decent looking boards round £40ish and at least 2 or 3 different chipsets too. Just a shame they don't seem to have firewire although I can't really grumble at these prices.

The HDMI version of the M2a-VM adds HDMI (obviously) and firewire :)

HDMI version adds a few bob but if it's worthwhile then it's probably worth it.

HDMI comes in the forms of an add in card and I seem to remember you get some of other outputs too :)

See everything it comes with here
Asus M2A-VM HDMI: AM2 mATX motherboard | silentpcreview.com

Q-connect which is worth it's weight in gold :)

The Asus-VM HDMI looks perfect. I have one more question though, on the Asus website it lists support for AM2+ cpu. Does that mean it supports phenoms? I'm a little hazy on AM2+ but it lists support only for AMD Socket AM2 Athlon64 / Athlon64 FX / Athlon64 X2 / Sempron. I'm going to have to keep digging me thinks.

Edit: The board does appear to support the phenom, I'm just curious how much of a performance hit using a Phenom in an AM2 board causes.