Have a strange request from a friend wanting a PC for £400. They want windows on it so that means I have £350 to work with. I've got some ideas for the build and at the moment have the Xonar D1 sound card in it and 8gbs of 1866 Hyper X predator RAM as well as the A10 APU. Can you do any better?
I dont think an audiophile need anything better... a10 are pretty stong cpus , also i would probably drop the RAM to cheaper 1333 or 1600 mhz as he wont see any difference, unsless hes a hard gamer ,also 1333 can oc nicely up to ~1700mhz and its dirty cheap :) Also i would consider changing the cpu to fx6300 if hes willing to upgrade gpu in the near future...
define audiphile, are we talking a music buff or someone who wants to make music with his pc?
We are talking somebody who loves to compose music and produce something at the end of it, somebody who has a monster collection of songs on iTunes and somebody that would want crystal clear recording options.
fast ram is a must, dual ssd in raid 0 would be awesome like dual 60gb, with a storage hdd if possible
and a am3/+ board but with a baisic cpu like an athlon for now (cause hes gonna want to upgrade in the future), with the rest on a top of the range sound card like the asus essence.
saying that im gonna try knock togeather a build based on this
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards+-+AMD/Socket+AM3%2B+Piledriver+FX/ASUS+M5A78L-M+LX+V2+AMD+760G+%28Socket+AM3%2B%29+DDR3+PCI-Express+Motherboard+?productId=47109
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-008-AS&groupid=701&catid=11&subcat=
http://www.novatech.co.uk/products/components/memory-pc/ddr3-pc3-14900/1866mhzplus/ble2cp4g3d1869de1tx0ceu..html
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Storage/Hard+Drives+-+Internal/3.5+Inch+SATA+Drives/160GB+-+600GB/500GB+Seagate+Barracuda+ST500DM002+3.5%22+SATA+III+Hard+Drive+?productId=46054
http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Power+Supplies+-+PSUs/Non-Modular+650W+or+less/500W+Corsair+Builder+Series+500CX+80PLUS+Bronze+Power+Supply+?productId=52661
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-326-AM&groupid=701&catid=1967&subcat=803
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-058-ZA
this comes to just under/over £360 so he could upgrade his cpu, and too add a ssd in the future. this is like the best sound card i could cram in for music production all the "better ones" are just more optimized towards gamming. so you would actually lose out on the music front.
when i was at college 5 years ago i was makking music on more basic hardware than this, so i know this will cut it as it is.
An APU benifets more from fast ram than any other type of system ... you dont appear to know what you're talking about