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$3000.00 what to buy
I have about $3000.00 to spend on a MacPro and was looking for some direction as to what to spend it on. I will be editing footage from the XH-A1,Canon 5D2 and screen captures made with Snapz Pro. I use motion a fair bit.
I was considering:
A refurbished 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor
with 3gigs of ramA raid card not sure to go with Apple or CalDigit.
Questions:
Am I going to kick myself for not getting and 8 core system?
Will a raid card give me a big performance boost?
Which raid card to get Apple or CalDigit?
How much ram to get?
Will I need to get the 4870 to get good performance in motion? -
3 Replies
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The 2.93 is 8 processors so you want 8GB RAM minimum. That’s the machine I run in my suite.
RAID card doesn’t give you the boost. The RAID itself does. The card depends on what RAID you’re going to run. I run Atto R380 cards here with our SAS/SATA raids from Maxx Digital. 8 to 16 TB running 8 to 16 drives giving us between 400 and 750MB/s. The speed is in the RAID itself and the card optimizes the speed.
I have pretty much only run ATTO cards here since I started the company 8 years ago, they’re great products.
ATI 4870 definitely is the best card for Color, but not really sure about Motion.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” now in Post.
Creative Cow Forum Host:
Apple Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Apple Color, AJA Kona, Business & Marketing, Maxx Digital. -
Thanks for the info on the raid card Walter that clear things up. I should have provided more info on one of the processors. The 2.93 I was considering is the Quad version not the 8-core version.
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I bought a quad core and sometimes as I stare at the machine rendering a video effect, I sigh wistfully and wish I got an 8 core. It’s my humble opinion that if you’re going to get all the RAID stuff and you’re going to be doing loads of motion effects and stuff then just bite the bullet and get the 8 core it costs more, but so does buying a 4 core then replacing it with an 8 because you need it.
good luck.
aka Newbie Wan Kenewbie. “The young Newbie, is now a Padawon.”
System
Mac Pro 2.8Gb quad core
8Gb RAM
1x 320Gb 7200 hardrive
1x 1Tb 7200 hardrive
Nvidia Geforce 8800 512mb Graphics card
1x 1Tb external WD ‘My Book’ eSataEquipment
Panasonic AG-HVX 200
Firestore FS-100
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