About to buy PC! Good enough for Cubase/Music making?

[Musicalkat]

Hello guys

I'm about to buy an off the shelf HP PC and wanted to check if you thought it would be good enough to run small-medium projects in Cubase with Reason and a few plug-ins.

The PC Spec is (HPE-475uk) :

Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Intel® Core™ i5 processor 650 3.2 GHz DUEL CORE (Level 2 cache 512 KB + level 3 shared cache 4 MB Intel® H57 PCH chipset)
6 GB DDR3 (4 DIMM sockets Supports up to 16 GB DDR3 memory)
1 TB SATA 3G Hard Disk Drive (7200 rpm)
...plus I'll be buying a USB audio interface- Lexicon Alpha Studio as a new PC won't take my PCI Delta 44.

I love making music but only do it as a hobby (only use mic, midi keyboard, Reason, Cubase and an MM6) so I'm not going to need major amount of tracks and effects open at once, but I hope that this set-up will be ok....I'm currently running a Pentium 4, 2.8ghz with 2GB of Ram but it's getting to slow for todays software.
I did look into older processors like AMD 4 and 6 core, but I think I want the option to upgrade to better i5/i7 in the future.

Is anyone running this kind of spec and finding it a problem with Cubase? Any advice would be wonderful!

Take care

Kat
_________________
PC-Pentium 4 - 2.8Ghz - XP Home (SP3) - 2GB RAM (max) 1 X 250GB HDD SATA for audio. 1 X bundled 160GB IDE HDD for apps.
SOUND - M-Audio Delta 44.
SOFTWARE/HARDWARE - Cubase SE, Cubase AI, Cubase Essential 4, Reason 4, Yamaha MM6, Rode NT1-A/Shure 58, Various Behringer preamps....a violin...an ocarina....

[djaychela]

Generally, as an all-intel system you should be OK, but sometimes manufacturers make odd decisions in the name of cost saving that leaves people with a problem when using for Music. The answer is "probably" in my experience. Sorry that it's not that much help, but I've only had one client come into problems recently, most off-the shelf PCs running W7 seem to work fine out of the box. Not optimally, but certainly usable.
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Darren
Core 2 Quad E6600, Win XP/7x64 Cubase 5.1.1, Profire 2626, ADA8000, Midex 8, Mackie Control, UAD-1
P4 2.4GHz, Profire 2626, ADA8000x2, DDX3216 (Mobile rig)
T6600 Win7x64 Laptop, M-Audio Fast Track Pro

[Musicalkat]

Thanks for the advice! It could be ok then, but it looks like coming in at £699.99...which I know is over the odds..

I've been looking at Dell because some of their PCs have a PCI slot which would save me getting a new audio interface. They've got some reasonable priced ones with AMD® Phenom™ II X4 830 (2.8GHz, 6MB Cache) and AMD® Phenom™ II X6 1045T (2.70GHz, 512kx6)...but they've also got Dell Studio XPS 8100 with Intel® Core™ i5 Processor 650 (3.20GHz, 4MB) so it's all a bit of a mine field!! I think I've been out of the loop for too long
_________________
PC-Pentium 4 - 2.8Ghz - XP Home (SP3) - 2GB RAM (max) 1 X 250GB HDD SATA for audio. 1 X bundled 160GB IDE HDD for apps.
SOUND - M-Audio Delta 44.
SOFTWARE/HARDWARE - Cubase SE, Cubase AI, Cubase Essential 4, Reason 4, Yamaha MM6, Rode NT1-A/Shure 58, Various Behringer preamps....a violin...an ocarina....

[thietavu]