Need Advice for Pc Upgrade For protools LE System

[urban5000]

I am Running A Digi02 rack with A lacie 160gb external Firewire Harddrive. My PC Has an AMD Athalon XP 2000+ Processor on A GIGABYTE motherboard and 1.67 GHZ and 1.00 GB of Ram. the only plug ins i have is the ones that came with protools and the free downloaded bomb factory. The problem that i am having is that almost everytime i try and record the process is halted stating that "the system held off etc... try raising the hardware buffer" I have raised it as high as it can go and i still experience this problem during music playback or recording and when im bouncing to disk. I beginning to think that AMD XP2000 is borderline as far as handling the processing power. I also have my CPU usage as high as it will allow me to raise it: 85%. Can someone please give me advice on what to Upgrade to: INTEL (IF so how Large?) or AMD Athalon XP (How LArge???)
I am really at wits end but I am not Buying A mac anytime soon. I would appreciate any advice from anyon.
Thanks
Daniel, in Texas

[tele_player]

An XP2000+ with 1 G of RAM is capable of reasonably good performance with ProTools. Does it do the same thing if you record to your system drive? What FireWire card is installed?

[bigbubbaj]

Ive got the XP 3000 and I can still run out of power at 24/96.

On the davec, test however (which is 16/44.1) I couldnt max out my system without running out of tracks.

I use 24/48 much more successfully.

Also, some plugins (amplitube) are HOGS.

[da BaSsTaRd!]

..."the system held off etc... try raising the hardware buffer" I have raised it as high as it can go and i still experience this problem....

the problem is not cpu power, the problem is your system: either chipset related or IRQ related.

what model is your motherboard? can you post an IRQ listing? attached hardware? more details, please...