I'll be going from an Antec solo to a Silverstone GD06. We are setting our office up as more of an audio / entertainment room. I will primarily be using this system for electronic music production (ableton Live 8 ), light gaming, and general home/htpc duties. Everything, essentially. Lol. However we are like many folks strapped for cash, so I'd like to upgrade monthly to feel like I'm making progress and give our bank account the impression it's only being hit mildly.. regularly..

Currently I have an Asus M4a78td-v evo ATX motherboard with an AMD Phenom ii x2 cpu, and a MSI R5770 with an Accelero S1 Rev.2 strapped on it. This will need to be changed to a micro ATX board, which opens up the possibility of moving to an intel cpu (which I would like to do, kind of). In addition the Accelero will be too tall to fit the case, which sucks because it's such a fine -quiet- product, so I'll need to change out my card or find a smaller cooler (so far no dice on that front). Oh, and I have a Cooler Master Silent Pro M600 power supply that I've been quite happy with, once again though it won't fit in the new case.

So far my plan is to stick with AMD (shocker, I know) by moving to a 960T or one of the x6 cpus.. this is to spare us having to buy a MoBo + CPU at once. As far as I can tell we should be fine with one of those processors. I've been more okay with this move since I think Ableton Live 8 makes good use of multiple cores. I'm still very doubtful of the new FX processors. Some time I'll be getting a Noctua NH-C14 for this set up. It seems like the best cooler I can fit in the GD06 by removing the ODD, when considering intel I was leaning towards a Scythe Big Shuriken and keeping the ODD.

Based on sticking with AMD my upgrade path looks like so-

ASUS M5A88-M AM3+ Motherboard ~$110 (fan Xpert, RAM support, etc dictated this choice)
AMD 960T / x6 ~$120
Noctua NH-C14 ~$80
HIS iSilence HD7750 ~$100 Open to suggestions, but this gives me about the same performance I have now with less power and a silent cooling solution. It also meets the GD06 height restriction.
Seasonic 360GP vs Silverstone ST50F-P This basically boils down to Gold+ rating and known quiet performance vs Bronze rating and modularity... I'm unsure.
Silverstone GD06 (I decided on this over the GD07 due to it going into a media center- the GD06's depth is perfect)

That makes this a 6 month crawl towards a new system. Would anyone mind chiming in on this plan? Particularly CPU choice and PSU choice, GPU if you have a thought of course.

Thank you so much, sorry for the lengthy post. I have a good deal of respect for the website / community and appreciate any thoughts.

Howdy. Too bad the GD07 won't fit - it's solves many of your problems.

I came across this benchmarking thread in the Ableton forum. I'm not familiar with this DAW s/w so can't comment on how well it loads the CPU as compared to what you do. But, if you pop forward to page 45-50 of the thread, you can see some current CPU results and maybe get a better feel for how much CPU horsepower/cores/threads you need. That said, I can't recommend a new build with a 2 year old 45nm quad core 95W TDP CPU. Yeah, it's a cheap quad core. But, in most cases, it's no faster than last year's $80 dual core Pentium (G850) that consumes half the power. Take a look at Anandtech's CPU Bench. There are some media creation benchmarks as well as video editing. You can compare CPUs head-head and maybe re-think the Phenom II.

PSU: Your system as spec'ed 100% stressed will use maybe 200W. More likely load will be ~150W. Of the two supplies, I think the G 360 is better for efficiency, regulation, etc.

GPU: The Sapphire passive tested out well, too.

Thank you for your thoughts. I'm glad you directed me towards Anandtech's CPU Bench, that was a helpful reminder of how far ahead Intel's architecture is currently. So after some discussion with the boss we've decided to allow a slight extension on the budget and go for an Intel setup.

An ASRock H77M with an Intel i3 3220.

Feeling more confident on the choices overall now. I really do prefer the Seasonic PSU but I'm so spoiled by modular power supplies. It'll just take a few extra zip ties to keep it neat, I suppose.

Thanks again!