[mworkman]

I had a system built by PC Audio Labs. I have built systems maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I felt out of the loop with all the newer stuff so I decided to buy. I bought this system with the idea that it should last me quite a while.

Motherboard: Intel DX79SI (X79 based chip set)
CPU: Intel 3.2Ghz i7-3930K
RAM: 64Gb DDR3-1600 Quad Channel

At the time I didn't know it but there was a thread on GearSlutz that gave me a high degree of buyers satisfaction on the i7-3930K and the X79 chipset. The CPU performance and the way it interfaces with the RAM form a really strong foundation

Video Card: AMD Radeon HD 5450

The card is fanless which was important to me. Not the most powerful card but the system really is ONLY for audio although I may want to get into video as some point and there are better options but I think most have fans for cooling.

Drives:
The OS and applications are on a 128Gb SSD. With 64Gb RAM there is no paging file. It is only the OS Win 7 Pro 64 bit and applications and I am trying to only choose applications that are 64-bit.

The audio drive are two 500Gb (SATA2 16Mb cache) in RAID 0 using a RocketRAID 640 card

The samples drive is 1Tb (SATA2 32Mb cache)

I have a hot swappable drive tray. I have two trays at the moment. One for another OS that I can boot with to use the machine on the internet. When I boot from the SSD it is purely an audio PC with no internet connectivity and just audio based applications. The second tray is for backing up the OS, Audio Drive and Samples drives.

I included a multicard reader with additional USB2/3 ports and one eSATA port. The card reader is USB3 but for whatever reason on boot the USB3 driver doesn't load. If I manually load the driver it is fine and I can reboot and it is fine but if I shutdown I have to reload the driver. I am planning on swapping this out.

There is plenty onboard USB2 and 3 ports. Also onboard Firewire 400 and I added a PCIe Fireware 800 card.

The audio interface is RME HDSPe MADI with a Lynx Aurora 16 AD/DA

I have two Samsung 22" monitors.

Everything is in a 4U rackmount case. I wish I had done some more research on that before hand... I made an assumption based on a rack case I saw on the website. The one I have has a big "door" across the front so to get the DVD, hot swappable drive trays, card reader, and front ports I have to drop the door down. My bad on that one.

The Audio PC that I am coming from was a dual Xeon box with 2Gb RAM (max) with IDE drive for the OS and Samples and SCSI drives for the audio. I am really happy with the box I configuration I have now. The hex core gives me 12 threads, I have way more RAM than I ever need, Reaper and other applications load really fast off the SSD and the samples (Superior Drummer) load much faster than my older system. I preparing to track some projects but as of now I haven't really pushed the audio performance yet but I expect good things.

I hope some of that helps in your decision making process.