Frankie, there's nothing wrong at all with Dell, EMachines, HP etc. I bought an EMachines for my lady about 3 years ago, and it looks and runs great. When I was shopping around Best Buy had a sale on an HP that is basically identical to what I have now except the CPU was the Phenom 4 core while mine is a 6 core and that probably makes little difference. With tax the total would have been $689 while mine was $600 even. Pretty close except my Gigabit motherboard still has a couple of things on it the HP doesn't and my Cooler Master case is dead quiet.

My point here in this thread is what are you going to use for your audio/midi interface? Internal or external? If it's external then the available slots on the mobo doesn't matter and lately a lot of the good ones are external USB. Some here are strictly part time hobbyists and are happy to use the standard onboard sound for that with no extra interface at all while others like me want a higher end prosumer interface like my 1820M that costs over $500. Also, you get a Dell or HP and the first thing you do is open it up to install something like my EMU then poof, there goes the warranty so you're right there with those of us who built a custom box anyway.

Just some things to think about.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.