MOTUnation.com

For you tech gurus here's a question. If I had to keep the price around $2500 for a Mac Pro and had two choices:
1. An 8 Core 2.8 with 8 gigs of ram from the most recent batch of 8 cores
2. The new Nehalem Mac Pro with one quad core 2.66 Mhz processor and 8 gigs of ram.

I'll use it with a lot of VI's.

Which one should be faster?

I'm gonna guess that #2 would be faster given the updated processor. But you'd want to see benchmarks to be sure.

Did I mention - I'm damn envious! What a problem to have...

Good luck. Either system will be amazing!

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:I'm gonna guess that #2 would be faster given the updated processor. But you'd want to see benchmarks to be sure.

Did I mention - I'm damn envious! What a problem to have...

Good luck. Either system will be amazing!

In addition to waiting for benchmarks on the new Mac Pro hardware itself, it may be a good idea to wait if you can for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) benchmarks on the new hardware. I think Snow Leopard is still supposed to be released around June, and a key feature of it is better support for multi-core processors. If there isn't much of a performance difference between the Mac Pros right now, the difference may become more pronounced with the newer OS. I'm going to be upgrading this year. I'm looking at things very closely because I tend to keep hardware a lot longer than most people so I'll be stuck with my choices for awhile. I have until December to take advantage of an educational discount.

this is purely speculative,the new mac pro's look impressive and yes they are expensive
it might be possible that Apple could introduce a budget tower line later in the year(rumored for ages) to offer more choices for Mac towers and get both the high end Pro market and the mid priced market as well.I am just theorizing but it seems to me they might have more planned then just 2 very powerful but pricey options.

And to interject some perspective here, I paid $2500 in 1990 for my Mac SE with a 20MB hard drive. $2500 today is less than it was 19 years ago, but look what you get for it now.

After all is said and done I ordered a 2.8 8 core for $2399 new at B&H. Free shipping no tax.

Sounds like a good move for you, and this way you're in at the base price and can upgrade memory and drives etc. incrementally as the budget (or need) allows (or dictates).

midilance wrote:After all is said and done I ordered a 2.8 8 core for $2399 new at B&H. Free shipping no tax.

Let us know how you get on with it and DP - Logic has allegedly been causing problems :

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread. ... 054&page=9

Do you mean the last generation dual 2.8 GHz Quad core? No problems with Logic there, I have both.