[daeron80]

Firewire is more than fast enough for recording if you have a good interface. If you feel the need to get latency below 2ms, yes, you want Thunderbolt, and it's going to eat your budget and then some. But if you can live with 3 or 4 ms, Firewire is fine.

I'm using a refurb HP Z440 with 64 GB RAM, and a Focusrite Saffire. Both are now a couple years old, but they handle everything I can throw at them with elegance and without hiccups. I can run a full orchestral template plus several hungry synth VIs and still add guitars with a HWB of 64, no problem. The secret is, the Z440 (and 660, and and 880) have Xeon chips rather than iN core. They're built to handle multiple heavy loads at once.

Meanwhile, make sure you open Task Manager and uncheck processor zero in the Affinity settings. You have to do it every time you run PT, after the session finishes opening. Why PT doesn't do it for us automagically, I can't imagine, but it doesn't. If you don't want to have to deal with silly workarounds like that, you just have to cough up the dough for a Mac. There are good used ones that will do what you want.