thinking to buy a new machine… any comments?

[Brian Charles]

If its After Effects performance you want then RAM is most important. 6GB is not nearly enough, particularly for CS5 and 64 bit. 16 to 32 GB is more like it.

If you’re compressing lots of video the Matrox card will help but again with CS5 Adobe’s media encoder will be pretty fast.

3TB, I’ve not got 12 TB, not all online but storage is cheap at $100 a bare 1TB drive. You can always add more later….

[Scott Novasic]

the thing I look for in my ae machine (on a mac) is a MINIMUM of 2 gigs of ram per core of CPU. In your case, minimum of 8. BUT, cs5 changes things somewhat, and the more memory the better.
Also, MULTIPLE large screen hi res monitors. Todays HD video requirements really need space to breath.
I did not notice you mention screens. I LOVE the Dell 30inch screen over apples. (I have both) better image better price and more versatile positioning. (and I love all things apple, so recommending Dell anything is odd from me) Personally I want an 8 core machine. I would even consider a slightly older mac, in that the pricing is so much better than the new towers. Lots of fast internal storage is nice to have as well. Dont know the matrox card well…. try and get at card with 512 megs on it if you can.
Overall, you will NEVER regret the purchase of great monitors, and they WILL make you more productive.
And lots of memory would be second. # of cores third. video card 4th hard drives 5th

good luck, and consider refurbished machines from the apple store. I almost always buy refurbished and use some of the savings on an applecare plan. Its a win win with no risk.

SuperNova
Animation & Visual Effects
Scott Novasic
Los Angeles Ca
web:https://web.mac.com/finaleffects

[Darby Edelen]

My only recommended changes would be:

-You don’t need the Radeon HD 4870, that’s over kill for AE. Your GPU will have almost no effect on AE performance.

-You should get the 8-core machine. This will improve performance dramatically with “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously” enabled.

-As suggested, you want as much RAM as economically possible. Do NOT have Apple pre-install additional RAM, they charge a ridiculous amount. Use a 3rd party vendor like:

https://www.datamemorysystems.com/_apple_info/Apple_Mac_Pro_Core_8_Xeon_2.66GHz_Memory_1535.asp

Darby Edelen