I actually posted this first on another thread...as it is somewhat sad of me to even consider this and I don't want to dis-respect anyone...as ALL of you have added great value to my amateur recording hobby thru your advise and wisdom.
 
But, I think I might need a new desktop to "ADD" to the already PURRFECT one I have in my mixing/mastering room. Of course, I am speaking about my amazing ProStudio from Purrfect Audio...thanks again Jim!
 
This new addition is for tracking only. In another room entirely. Used for up to 16 mics at a time and maybe just 14 mics and the bass direct and myself using TH2, although I am not entirely sold on TH2.
 
If all comes out great and I can get a killer sound with TH2 during mix down, then great.

So...and don't throw things at me, why can't I just get a cheap off the shelf pc. I get it...with mixing/mastering get the best, and I did. And, for tracking I am thinking I can cheat a little, only because I don't have anymore studio funds.

I found one with i7, 3.2GHz, 8GB ram and one TB HDD. I can wipe the drive re-load Win7 without any crap and configure the bios, and then optimize or tweak for use.

Why is this a bad idea...as it is all I can afford.

I know this is stupid, as I love my Prostudio...but cannot afford a second one.
 
I am struggling to get this laptop of mine to work with out pops/clicks and am aware that I am asking way too much of this machine...no matter how much tweaking and optimizing I do.

Now that PC hardware has progressed so much, it is totally viable to use an off the shelf PC as your DAW. Acknowledging that you'll need to replace/upgrade it more often...but that's offset by the initial price which is usually lower than a custom built machine.
 
There's still things to be wary of though. On-board graphics for one, which might not be powerful enough or may cause system resource hogging. Also RAM speed, and PSU wattage.
 

I think what you are proposing is a great idea.  As stated above simply be careful of the specs.  Many users have remote systems for off site recording. 

To be honest, for mixing and mastering the PC doesn't matter so much because you can up the latency to stupid levels and it doesn't matter.  Who cares if there's a half second pause between hitting Play and the system actually going into playback...
 
Where it DOES matter is when you're recording, especially if you're wanting to track 16 channels live.  The last thing you want is a dropout because a cheap HDD couldn't keep up...
 
This should be in Computers ....    Moving it.

The one I looked at had the Intel 4600.
 
That is what my ProStudio has.

I have a similar situation to you in that I do FOH at live gigs and often need to record every channel for mix down later.
 
My solution was a cheap, old laptop doing nothing but recording.  My 24 channel digital mixer provided 24 tracks through Firewire direct to the laptop where it was recorded to an external HDD using Presonus Capture.  The thing here is that Capture does nothing else than dump the incoming tracks to disk, and the laptop was doing nothing else other than running Capture.
Since I moved up to 32 channels my old HDD wasn't fast enough so I used the excuse to upgrade to a macbook with an external drive on thunderbolt.  Problem solved.
 
But the point is,  you need speed for recording and power for mixing.

Karyn, when you say you used an external thunderbolt drive do you mean a USB3/thunderbolt type that gives USB3 data speeds or a dedicated thunderbolt RAID setup like a G-Force?

My reason for asking is I'm considering a similar setup and a G-Force is much more expensive than a 7200rpm drive in a USB3 enclosure.

Personaly I use one of these Lacie drives.  The 1 TB version.
 
It has both USB3  (5Gbits/s) and Thunderbolt (10Gbits/s) interfaces.
While it only uses a 5400 rpm drive (Rated 110MBytes/s) 32 channel 48K/24bit recording requires a sustained 4.5MBytes/s transfer rate which it easily handles.  
 
48000 x 3(bytes) x 32(channels) = 4608000 Bytes/s or approx 4.5MB/s
 
The bottle neck for my old setup was a really old laptop (core2centrino) trying to run Win8 and a USB HDD.  The poor thing just couldn't cope.
 
I use the Lacie mainly because it's meant to be drop proof (within reason) and it could end up getting some serious abuse in the environments it'll get exposed to.
 
 
I would add that being 5400rpm I would NOT recommend it as the main data drive for a DAW where you're throwing files back and forth.  That relies on fast random access and you really need 7200rpm.

16 tracks x 96000 samples/ sec x 24 bits /sample= 36,864,000 bits /sec /8 = 4,608,000 bytes or 4.6 MB /sec
 
That is the load you will be putting on your hard drive. The load on your CPU and the internal processing in an audio interface is negligible by comparison to the limit of the drive writing. That speed should be well within reach of a good 7200 rpm drive with a decent buffer, even assuming the tracks are being written as individual files. You need a fast hard drive for recording dry, not a lot of processor speed.

As I said in the other thread, I have used a pathetic laptop to record 16 tracks of audio without issues, But I always use a 7200R PM HD and it is as empty as possible. 
 
You can build yourself a great computer using top quality parts for around $600 I just did. 
 
And if I was building just for tracking I could have saved more. 
I would think an i3 quad and 4 Gigs of RAM with a SSD drive would do the trick. 
SSD use very little juice so you don't even need a huge power supply anymore. 
You hurry there are still sales happening. 
 
On a real budget- stop by your local computer repair shop and ask if they have any trade ins. My local shops re sells ready to go W7 computers for $200-$300. Some have pretty decent specs. 
Bet they'd add a SSD drive too.