if you want to make music and dont care about gaming, a cheaper card will do aswell. if you want to use this pc for gaming too, then go for a gf4 ti.
and the 40gig harddisk would be too small for me , my sample-dir alone is about 40gig, but this depends on you ofcourse. I just say that a 40gig and another 40gig harddisk later are much more expensive than one 80gig from the start.
I suggest you do not buy a GeForce MX graphic-card, they are much slower than the non-mx models and the difference in price isn’t that big. Even a GeForce 2 Ti is often fater than a GeForce 4 MX…
I suggest you skip to install the office-package on your music-computer casue that will f**k you r computer up seriously and you won’t be capable to do anything with it Office is EVIL!
if you do not care about the graphic at all you can probably buy any cheap card that can handle the reolutions you want to use, but if you want to get a decent card that you can use if you happen to feel peckish for a game or so, get a GeForce 3 or 4 non mx-model or a radeon 7500 or above
You might soon want a bigger HD, and it doesn’t cost much more now to at least double (or even triple) that size.
I have this gfx card, and even though various peoples comments here is true, it works fine for me. One good thing is that it hasn’t got a fan, which makes it quiet. Another good thing it that the drivers have support for multiple workspaces. I use that all the time.
This is one of the cheapest cards thuy sell there. Only these cards are cheaper… but are they better?? i’m just no computer expert. And the difference is only a few euro’s (10)
The chassi, processor, motherboard and memory is fine. I would however, if I were you, go for a bigger harddrive. There is no such thing as too much hd space.
I would also try to get a gf4-ti but that will cost you twice as much as the gf4-mx. You also have the gf fx-5200 wich is priced as the gf4-ti but I don’t know anything about this card and since gf fx has been described as super-noisy perhaps it’s a bad choise for a music computer.
Anyway, for music the gf-mx is fine but you will run in to problems with games.
The most important thing is however to look around. There are obvious advantages with going to your local dealer but you will often get better deals with internet dealers. Also, if netherlands is anything like sweden you should avoid electronic warehouses. i.e. places that sell tvs, vacuum cleaners, videos and computers… In my experience they are almost always way overpriced and will trick you with deals like “get the computer to day, pay in one year” or “no-interest 98 months payment plan”.
The dual in 'Asus P4P800 Intel 865PE Dual DDR400/LAN/SATA/ USB 2.0/5.1 Sound ’ does not mean dual monitor. It means dual channel memory and means simply that cpu and memory can swap information at double speed.
If you wan’t to use dual monitors then you need this function on the gfx-card. Matrox cards support this.
I’ve never tried dual monitor but I can’t see any reason why renoise shouldn’t work like any other program.
With dual monitor you can have renoise on one of the monitor and some softsynths or other applications on the other. I suppose you could also stretch renoise and let it span over both monitors… but that’s only a guess.
With the gfx card you will probably get software to make all kinds of settings.
Note on the matrox cards… with these you will get excellent performance in 2d-applications but it will suck in 3d games…
I’m sure there are both geforce and radeon cards that also supprt this but I don’t know of any… It’s been a while since I was up to date with computer technology…
software does not need to support dual-monitors, you basically have a desktop like 2048x768 (or something). You cant run renoise on both screen though, because you will have the edges of both monitors right in the middle of you renoise screen. but (!) its great if you use VSTi’s or anything which does open a window above the renoise surface, because you can drag this window to the other screen. dual-monitor-setups are great and make working easier with pretty much anything, so go for it.
I would have bought an 800MHz instead of a 533MHz processor. I’m not sure how big difference this makes in reality and haven’t found any comparisons between the two, but it would feel wrong to down this step when there’s no big difference in price. Going from a 2.67 GHz, 533 MHz to a 2.6 GHz, 800 MHz is 200-250€ more expensive (in Sweden at least). This is probably the processor which gives you the most for the money atm. It you want to go up ~700€ more you might wanna go for a 2.8MHz/800MHz processor, but going up more in speed makes it really expensive and not worth it anymore.
As I tried to say in previous posts: because the price versus performance of the non mx-cards is realy bad, you get MUCH more performance for the money if you buy a non MX-model, an NON-MX GeForce2 is often faster than a GeForce4 MX…
And when it comes to diffrent brands of the same card it doesn’t realy matter, watch wich features the card have instead and see wich card that suites you best (do you realy need TV-out, digital out etc etc), and do NOT buy a PCI-graphic card, all new motherboards have AGP-ports and to use a PCI-graphic card, on such a mobo is like using stone-wheels on a car…
And when it comes to the motherboard, watch the tests at www.tomshardware.com and http://www.anandtech.com/ to find out goods and bads about different cards. Asus is good in general and use to place among the best 3 in almost all tests, but also take a look at the features on the board (why buy a card with sound when you have an external pro-audio card? why buy a mobo with raid-controller when your not going to use raid on your harddrives, do you want LAN on the mobo or a external PCI card that you easily can replace etc etc…)
Office is EVIL! 
