Need advice on dedicated PC for Kontakt

Hi, I run a mac with pro-tools, but was considering getting a dedicated PC to run a standalone version of Kontakt. Just wanted to know if anyones got any advice/specific hardware suggestions. I want the PC to run only Kontakt, and I want to strip back as much of the unnecessary OS and hardware as possible. I guess there are some things to consider; 1) Kontakt streams from disk now, so not sure how much RAM would be required (what is the max these days on PC?). 2) I need a MIDI card, and an audio card something that has ADAT optical out so I can get 8 channels to the input of my 002 (is this possible?). 3) I need a hard drive for my samples (can I put them on the system drive?) 4) Don't need fancy graphics cards/modems/dvd burners etc... just maximum power and minimum fuss Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

I am doing the same thing for GigaStudio. Check out Shuttle's XPCs I am going to get the RME Hammerfall 9652 audio card

Thanks Cliffy Boy that's great. Couple o more questions; So does Kontakt require GSIF, or is that just in the case of wanting to use Gigastudio? Would an seperate internal hard drive do the trick for the samples? Cheers

Kontakt standalone is ASIO. Gigastudio is GSIF. Kontakt is also RTAS so it can be plugged into PT very nicely. A separate internal HD is just as good as a separate. Kontakt allows at least two separate installs so it could reside on both the PT machine and the KOntakt machine. If you use a FW, you can just keep one set of samples and plug the drive into whichever machine you are using.

Any advice about the actual build of the machine. ie. motherboards, cpu's etc... (I know jack s**t about this stuff). I don't want to get incompatible hardware. This is what I'm thinking; Asus A7N8X-X (nForce 2) AMD ALthlon XP 3000+ 333fsb 2x 512Mb PC3200 DDR RAM WD 80gb Hard Drive with (8mb cache) Powercolor Radeon 9200 128Mb Video Card (the cheapest I could find) Hammerfall HDSP 9632 (but still a little pricey, any cheaper options?) just want something with ADAT optical @ 96k outputs Any thoughts?