I just bought a Q6600 system for around 400 dollars, with a P5Q-E motherboard, and 4 GB OCZ Reaper ram. Great system, overclocked it to 3.0ghz easily with the stock HSF.

Thanks for the reply. I've spent most of today researching this stuff and that's one setup I'm considering - the P45 chipset and a quad core CPU. Glad to see it's working for someone already. :)

Well, after talking to a few others, I went with the Q6600 and an Intel P45 chipset. We'll see how it goes! :)

The P45 is a great chipset. In fact, its just about every bit as good as the X48 with the exception of the dual x16 PCIe channels.... unless you're going with a SLI video card configuration (which will sound like a jet engine in your studio), the P45 is just as good.

I see threads like this all the time that never have that last post - the one that kinda sums things up. So here's that post. After some time using the hardware I described above, all I can say is wow.. What a huge improvement over my old system! I thought I'd try Vista Ultimate and see how it worked - I mean, what the heck.. If it didn't I could always go back to XP. Results? Songs with many tracks, no problem. Plugins? No sweat. Everything seems to run really, really well. Things that would bring the old setup to its knees, are now no challenge whatsoever. Overall, this setup really works great! :) If you're considering a value-priced DAW setup, this might do it. It's certainly working for me!