Members Lawrence Farr Posted June 17, 2006 Members Share Posted June 17, 2006 Awhile back when my studio system finally died (Sony Vaio) I was forced to put my Media Center computer into service as a daw. Uh... my family was NOT happy about that. Well surprise, surprise... it's doing great. For $700 this thing rocks and has "all the right stuff". Here it is in a nutshell... ======================================== Gateway GT 4010 MCE system from Best Buy. Roughly $700.00 AMD Athlon 64 3500 w/ 1 gb. I added another 1 gb to it. 200 gb system drive. I installed my other 200 gb 7200 rpm audio drive. Double Layer 16x Multi Format DVR+-RW drive. I added a $75 graphics card to the ePci slot for dual monitors. USB2 / Firewire ports. 9-in-1 Digital Memory Card reader slots. Great for moving mixes or projects around. I use a 1gb SD card and often carry a small usb SD reader in my pocket to other studios. You can plug that thing into any computer with USB slots without platform issues... it shows up like a disk drive. The Gateway accepts/reads/writes about every card format out there including the CF microdrives. I use a MOTU Traveler (firewire) as the audio interface with the onboard firewire and it works great. Not a single glitch or issue. Remember, the MCE firewire path has to be stable enough to do things like record one movie while watching another (to an external firewire drive) without glitching, so I don't think they skimped in that regard. Haven't tried recording audio to an external firewire drive though as I don't have to with the internal audio drive. I can't imagine it would be an issue. I had a 2408 but the old PCI card was incompatible with the modern motherboards, worked fine but caused random digital hashing. The Traveler is a great replacement. Backup to DVD-R. Burn CD's with Nero (included). It's the best daw system I've every had. ======================================== This thing makes a great PC Daw. It's relatively quiet, powerful and the AMD processor kicks butt. The only thing you need to do is disable Media Center (and the usual PC tweaks). I also use Vegas 6 and obviously the MCE system makes a great video editing PC. With all the talk about avoiding Media center PC's I thought I'd have problems. It actually appears that the Media Center OS is optimized for uninterrupted streaming (burn a cd while watching a recorded movie while playing an internet video), it makes a very, very efficient PC daw OS. I run SX 3 on it (with BFD, Fruity Loops 6 etc.) and it smokes. If you're looking to upgrade visit your local Best Buy. Slap a large fast drive inside that puppy for recording and use the onboard firewire for your audio interface. Off to the races... I went out and got another one to get my "Tivo" back in the house. After a week without Media Center I was going nuts. Lawrence Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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