new desktop advice - without building one

[taeagan]

Anybody have any advice on buying a desktop for use with MBox/PTLE 6.9? I've never built one before and I don't intend to start now. Any experiences with brands/cpus/models that are good or bad, one way or the other? I wouldn't be using it for anything other than ProTools. I assume some things I should be looking for are:

Dual video card
USB and firewire ports
CPU speed
RAM

Things I don't care about - hd space (I have an external), networking, bundled software.

[yavuzj]

Price Range?

[taeagan]

As cheap as possible!

Seriously. I'm looking into this because of the troubles that I'm having running it on a high performance $2000 laptop. I just want a desktop that I can dedicate to PT and have it run transparently. If I could get away with one of those $500 Dell's, I'd be happy to do it.

[yavuzj]

OK. If you do not want to build one, look here;
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...aZuEqmc/2.?p=0

You can expect 23 tracks from DaveC test from that one.
Not bad and will do the Job.
I had it it worked great then I sold it for the same price after 3 months and
built this machine for the same price.

But if you do not want to build it go with the first choice, you won't regret it.