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buying a mac! need help!
I am about to buy a Mac Pro and start using Final Cut but am getting varied opinions on some things. Is the difference in performance between the 2.66 and the 3 gig processors substantial? I have a small home based editing business. Will I need the 3G processor? I have always used a pc so all this is new to me. Why is the ram so dang expensive? I have some DDR2-667 ram. Will this be compatible in a mac? How much ram is recommended? Can I get by with 2G or should I go for 4?
Thanks for any opinions. -
4 Replies
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1. Don’t buy extra RAM from Apple. Buy it from Crucial, or Other World Computing… it’s less expensive and quite good.
2. Probaby the sweet spot in pricing is the 2.66… the 3 gig machine will only be about 13% faster and only for renders and encoding… lot of money to pay for that bit of speed. (a power user would want it, but…)
3. Start with 2 gigs. if you find that it starts doing a lot of disk caching, or you want to run Motion a lot, then add ram as needed. You’ll know when you start disk caching instead of RAM caching.. it will slow down a ton. State of the Art hardware costs more always… get used to it if you intend to run state of the art. I don’t think your RAM needs to be 667MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory. If it is this it should work, but has to be installed in matched pairs.
4. Buy at least one more internal drive with it for media storage. Don’t count on using the startup disk for this. Post what format you intend to start editing, and we can give you some help there… HD requires a lot more speed drive wise than HDV or DV would for example.
5. Buy a mac. You’ll never look back.
Jerry
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For now, I will be editing DV. Thanks for the info about the processor. Re: buying the RAM elsewhere, I read on another forum that Crucial and others were not shipping RAM for the MAC Pros any longer. They were having too many problems with it. Any thoughts? Did you buy the RAM with heat sinks or without?
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The ram MUST have heat syncs.
Yes Apple ram is more expencive but it is also the highest quality ram out there.
If you will be edoing DV you honestly dont even need the slower processer.
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[lisaj] ” I read on another forum that Crucial and others were not shipping RAM for the MAC Pros any longer. They were having too many problems with it”
Crucial, OWC, Techworks, transintl.com, and other good companies are selling Mac Pro memory currently. All you have to do is select the computer you are going to buy on their websites and they will match you to the correct memory for it (as specified by Apple).
Jerry’s suggestion are good and I’d go with that. I would consider upgrading to 4gb of RAM though. If you run more than one application at a time you’ll see better performance and less spinning beach-balls (and you will be running more than one application at a time).
I also recommend you upgrade the graphics card to the ATI X1900. Its a lot of bang for the buck and well worth it in my opinion.
If you want Bluetooth and/or Airport be sure to add them when you order as they are not end user upgradable later.
Enjoy, your new Mac!!
Tony!
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