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It was right around the time that the Mac Pros came out. My tried and true Mac Dual G4 just wasn’t holding up to the demands that I was putting on it for my audio production work. As I pondered the specs of the new Mac Pro it made me dizzy imagining all the tracks, plugins and software synthesizers I could use simultaneously. But despite how good a deal it was comparatively, I couldn’t even come close to the $2500 price tag. So for a devoted Mac user I did the unthinkable: started pricing PC’s!

I switched to Macs 5 years ago, having grown tired of all the crashes and hardware conflicts that my older Windows 98 machine encountered. And it really was better. I could plug in audio gear or install drivers without, say, the colors of my screen suddenly going berserk, or the entire system crashing because I added a trackball mouse. But all this was predicated on my working at a Mac-only school that lent me the use of a great dual 1.25 G4 computer for my home use. I didn’t have the money even then to buy a Mac. So fast forward to now (6 months ago) and the quandary was very clear. I had to do something to handle the increasing demands I was putting on my computer and I had to do it for as cheap as possible.

Macs don’t “sound” better than PC’s. In the world of audio nearly every variable that goes into capturing a musical performance digitally effects the sound EXCEPT what computer you record, mix and master on. This was the first thought that eased my mind. The second realization that pushed me over the edge was that Ebay was flooded with PC components and they were CHEAP!

So I began quietly bidding on all the pieces I would need to put together a very fast PC. I decided to go after “slightly behind the times” technology, meaning that if dual 3.0ghz processors were the fastest thing out there, I would bid on 2.6ghz processors because they don’t have the tremendous markup that the “fastest in their class” had. I also was seeing a great deal of benefit from the fact that AMD was falling out of favor with PC enthusiasts upon Intel’s release of their Conroe processors. And to finish it off, I seemed to have perfected my “blanket bidding” technique where I determine, say, 20 identical items for auction and I low-ball bid on ALL of them. Most of the time I would lose, but every once in a while I would actually win the item for real cheap. And a few times I won several of the same item so I sold off the extras, every time at a profit! (Maybe I took better pictures:)

Either way, in the end I had an AMD dual 2.6ghz processor that I had gotten for $96, a 400gb SATA II hard drive that I had gotten for $86, a motherboard, power supply and graphics card for $69, and finally 4gb of RAM for $228. The ATX case I had gotten out of the trash. So all said, I spent $479 (including the shipping I paid) on my new PC.

So I’ve been writing and recording on my new PC for about 6 months now and really don’t miss my Mac all that much. While I had gotten pretty used to Apple’s Logic, I’ve always been a decent Protools user so I switched to Protools for audio production work. Sure, I had a few problems getting everything to play nice together but now it’s running stably and consistently. I’m not going to try to compare 5 year old Mac technology to 1 year old PC technology, that wouldn’t be fair. But my new machine screams through audio at least as fast as the dual G5’s I used at the school. Maybe one day I will have enough money to keep myself “in” with the newest, latest, greatest Mac, but until then I’ll probably just keep building myself slightly “behind the times” PC’s for a fifth of the cost!

Hans Erik
Content Marketing Director
Hans@Next2Friends.com
www.Next2Friends.com