Building a new Mac Pro for A.E _ Help Please :)

[Steve Roberts]

I have the 8-core (previous generation) with 8 GB RAM, with the X1900, and it’s great. If anything, I’ll get more RAM to knock it up to 16GB.

You don’t need the hottest graphics card — it’s not worth it. You may want more drives, depending on your workflow — you definitely need to keep sources & renders on a drive separate from the system drive. If you have 3 drives (system/renders/sources) things should go even better, since you don’t have to read & write to the same drive … but that might be splitting hairs, performance-wise.

Anyway, I think you should get the mid-range graphics card, 8GB RAM, and at least two hard drives.

[Adam Duguay]

Hey Steve,

Thanks for the response. I’ve reconfigured the specs blow, let me know what you think.
I’m trying to keep the price under $4000.00 to stay within our budget.

Specifications

Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
4GB (4 x 1GB)
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
3 x ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X

I’m not sure about the video card. I’m not sure about the benefits of the other cards that apple offers. Would you consider the one I’ve chosen a midrange card? And does 3 X ATI etc… mean that it comes with 3 individual cards?

[Steve Roberts]

Hmm … yes, it looks as if the “3X” means three cards.

My mistake — the 8800 is the mid-range card. I thought you were going for the 5600.

I went for the mid-range X1900 card (not the basic card) for the sake of Motion and Color, since they depend on the card quite a bit. AE, not as much so. Color runs well, but I haven’t had a chance to test Motion on this machine. Also, I use Cinema 4D, which benefits from a better card. If Adobe supports the basic 2600 card, I’d probably choose it if I was only doing AE and FCP, but I don’t know the details of the card’s features.

You should put more money into RAM (8GB), possibly going to https://www.crucial.com/ to stay in budget. I’ve read good things about crucial.

Hope that helps …

[Brian Charles]

I agree. I currently have a MacPro Quad and have just ordered the 8 core. Spend the money on RAM but don’t buy it from Apple. Get the minimum, 2 GB from Apple and get your RAM from a reputable reseller. I ordered 8 GB from OWC for $399. I’v eused their RAM in my current system and its fine.

[Brian Charles]

Don’t order your additional drives from Apple. Intalling a drive takes about 2 minutes, no fuss they just slip in. Cost of a 500GB SATA retail is close to $100.

[Scott Keck]

Check NewEgg for RAM. You can get 8GB for $299 (4 x 2GB). If you’re concerned about rendering speed, you should get Nucleo Pro and all the RAM you can manage. Since Nucleo will run 1 instance of AE per core in the background, you’ll essentially have a 7-CPU render farm. And you’ll want each CPU to have access to as much RAM as you can squeeze into the machine (and out of your budget). Those are my thoughts. Get the make/model of the motherboard and then shop for RAM elsewhere, buy only the minimum you need to boot the thing up, from the place where you’re buying the machine. And a right- on commend about the HD, you can get a SATA WD 750GB drive online right now for under $160 (internal). No reason to pay double that or more from your hardware vendor.

Improviz in SF

[Adam Duguay]

This is all awesome information! Thanks so much everybody!

A

[Brian Charles]

Make sure you get the correct RAM. The new MacPro require 800mhz FB DIMMS, I checked NewEgg and they only have the 667mhx ones advertised on-line.

[Jimmy Brunger]

I agree, get minimum RAM and HDDs from apple (even get basic GFX card installed and add a better one yourself later if you need it – that will save $$$£££)

Also, I could be wrong here, but I woudn’t think there’s any need to get 3 GFX cards in there…unless you’re running more than 2 x DVI monitors off it.

I’d be interested to hear some real world benchmarks between the basic ATI card and the NVidia mid-range when used with Color & Motion?…

*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1.0.1 / Elastic Reality
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Win XP Pro 32 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / DVS SDI Clipstation / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB/80GB/600GB RAID-0

[Chad Gilmour]

I got 4gb of RAM from crucial.com, they have a really really user friendly site, you don’t even have to know anything about RAM, and it’s actually made in… AMERICA! what a crazy idea. Apple’s “superior” RAM isn’t even made here. KEEP IN MIND: that when you call for support their going to blame your 3rd party RAM for the problem more than likely, not that they still won’t fix the problem it just gets to be a HUGE pain at times when you’ve got projects mounting and they’re giving you crap about your 3rd party RAM.
Anyways, I got a quad core 2.66 with 5gb of RAM and 2 hardrives and this thing is pretty fast running AE 8.0. HD still can be a bit sluggish though (might be the 85 effects I’ve put on it though too), I’ve never fed it HD footage though.