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