Mac Pro Config

[Jeff Carpenter]

1) Just buy from Apple.

2) The GeForce 8800 card is worth the $200 upgrade, but any of those cards are really fine for what you’ll be doing. So this is optional, but I’d do it if it were me.

3) Just get the 2 GB of RAM. Buy the rest from either crucial.com or search the archives here on this subject. There are other suggestions in past threads. Upgrading yourself to 4 GB is probably fine for now, but 8 is great too.

4) I suggest upgrading the boot drive to 500 GB. But after that, buy the rest of your drives from other sources. You have 3 slots left. Get SATA 300 drives with 32 MB caches and 7200 RPM. Just make sure it’s a brand you’ve heard of. Seagate, Western Digital, and Hitachi are all fine. Once you find a model, price compare around the ‘net.

5) Any particular reason you’re upgrading the processors to the 3 gHz? It sounds like you keep your computers for a long time. If that’s the reason, that’s fine. Just be aware that you probably won’t notice much difference in day-to-day usage between the 2.8 and the 3.0 gHz machines. I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but just be aware that ‘future-proofing’ is the reason you’re doing that particular upgrade.

6) If you’re looking to save cash, find the refurbished Macs on the Apple.com store. (Lower left on page.) You can’t upgrade the video cards or boot drives in this case, but just go with what’s there and upgrade the RAM and other drives as usual. ANYTHING in there is going to feel a million times faster than your current computer, so it might be money well-saved in your case. Buying new’s just as great too…a suggestion. (They come with the same warranty as the new ones.)

7) You don’t say, but make sure you have at least Final Cut 5.1. In fact, go into your apps folder and select each app. Hit Command-i to open the info. Under “Kind” if it says ‘Universal’ you’re fine. If it says ‘PowerPC’ you’ll probably want to upgrade that program. Check their websites to see if it’s a free upgrade (usually not) or a paid upgrade to get to the Universal version. Take this cost into account before you decide on hardware. (Keep in mind that iLife programs come free with a new Mac. Those will be fine.)

[Steven J. gilbert]

Jeff,

You read very correctly about me keeping my systems for a while. I have to justify the upgrade with the amount of business that I produce outside of running a government television station. I will be upgrading all apps to FCS 2. Thanks for your assistance. I have a couple of follow-up questions.

Would you purchase 3 – 2Gb RAM chipsets to get to 8 Gb?
Would you just go with the fastest machine 3.2 Ghz or would 2.8 be fine?
Here is the drive info: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM.
Would 500 Gb be fine or should I go for the 750 Gb?

I would like to eventually look at an external RAID down the road and new monitors, but a new CPU should get me started in the right direction to help me be more efficient. I have to render most all of my transitions now. The final edits are great, but I am not efficient time-wise producing them. Thanks again.

Steve

[Jeff Carpenter]

>>Would you purchase 3 – 2Gb RAM chipsets to get to 8 Gb?

* Final Cut likes to have all RAM chips the same. So if you do this you’ll want to ditch the 2 GB that comes with the computer and buy 8 GB total. Why do this? Well, if you think you’ll some-day want more than 8 GB, you’ll still have free slots since you only used 4 slots. Buying 8×1 will use up all your RAM slots. If you DON’T think you’ll ever buy more than 8, it’s probably a waste of money to buy the 8 GB in 2-gig sticks as opposed to buying 6 GB of 1-gig sticks and adding to what’s in there.

>>Would you just go with the fastest machine 3.2 Ghz or would 2.8 be fine?

* Do you do a lot of rendering and conversions? If you’re contstantly compressing 3-hour shows to MPEG 4 or DVD then you’ll see a big difference. If you only work on :30 spots all day then the speed change won’t matter as much. That’s the part to focus on. Will speeding up conversions and renders make a difference to you? Because that’s the one place you’ll really notice the difference. For anything else you do, it’s all going to be pretty similar.

Remember, this machine is going to give pretty good real-time performance too. The ‘dynamic’ playback setting does a good job of dipping quality when it needs to, just to make the playback smooth. You can render the parts you NEED to, but you’ll find those are few and far in between. These days I generally only render at the end, before output. I’m not sitting around rendering every effect just to preview it anymore.

>>Here is the drive info…

* That looks fine. Someone around here also suggested this the other day:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145167

You could buy 4 of those for $1,020, have a huge 1 TB boot drive AND make a 3 TB internal SATA RAID too! (Using OS X’s disk utility.) Lots of space and super fast. (No redundancy, though. You could also RAID for safety if you prefer and just have less space.)

With 4 SATA drives inside, you can get a lot done before you have to start thinking of external drives.

[Steven J. gilbert]

Here are some specs:

Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
2GB (2 x 1GB)
320GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X
AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) – Auto-enroll

Purchase:
4 – 2Gb RAM (Crucial)
4 – 1Tb Hitachi or Seagate Drives

When replacing the boot drive do I just do a restore or mirror the boot drive by installing the drive in bay 2? I will consider replacing my 2 – 17″ Studio Displays w/ 23″ down the road. Thanks.

[Jeff Carpenter]

For a new computer I just suggest taking the drive and out re-installing OS X from the DVD onto the new drive. No point trying to clone a fresh install when you can just do your own.

I don’t know if this is silly or not, but in this situation I would replace JUST the boot drive, install OS X, and then install the other 3. I always get paranoid about choosing the right drive for putting the OS on, and that takes care of that problem.

* Use Disk Utility to refomat all drives as Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+). Turn journaling on for the boot drive but leave it off for the others that will be media drives.

* Holding down the mouse button while restarting will always open the DVD tray. Holding down “C” while re-starting will always boot from the DVD. These both work even when no OS or boot drive is present.

* Disk Utility lives in APPLICATIONS/UTILITIES. You can use that to format drives 2-4. To format the boot drive, launch from the DVD and find Disk Utility in the menus.

* Run System Update multiple times (until it stops finding stuff) BEFORE you install your apps. After you’ve installed everything, do the whole thing again.

* I suggest getting a USB hard drive and setting Time Machine to use it. Very much worth it. Not only can you restore individual files, you can use it to restore the entire boot disk if it goes bad. Exclude your media drives from Time Machine back-ups. Either make a redundant RAID, or (what I do) make sure you ONLY put media on the RAID that exists on tape and can be re-captured if need be. Leave graphics, music, project files, and stuff like that on the boot drive.

Here’s a suggestion:
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/494445-REG/Western_Digital_WDG2T10000N_1_TB_My_Book.html