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Upgrading Mac Pro Tower
Hey all,
I’m going to be upgrading to a new MacPro tower. From your experiences, is there a significant difference between a quad-core and 8-core? Either way I’m going to add a few internal 1TB SATA drives (Western Digital?). I think that may be a better use of money. Obviously there’s a difference between quad and 8, just wondering if it’s worth the money.
I’m mostly using FCP and AE for SD projects, but probably more HD in the future. I’ve been using a Power Mac G5 Quad so whatever I get will definitely be an improvement!
Thanks!
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5 Replies
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Any will work nicely, the faster (8-core) will be much better for programs like Compressor and AE but most people feel that there is a lot of untapped power in the multi-core systems that will be untapped in the near future. The new OS coming out this year will be the start of it. So if you can afford it it will get certain things done faster, which is important, but at this time there is nothing that an 8-core can do that a quad cannot. The faster machine will have a longer life span also.
On the drives make sure they are business/workstation class or better. Take a look at 1.5 TB drives you can pick up 2 for less than $250.
My drive set up recommendation is small system drive whatever is standard (300-500GB fine) then a single drive for Time Machine (1.5TB) then 2 media drives and you can strip them together for a little more speed. $400 for the extra drives!
I also use a 10 drive array for my HD projects, 6-8 camera multicam projects.
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Thanks Michael!
Any recommendations on where to look online for that kind of deal on SATA drives?
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I buy a lot of drives from MWave.com or macsales.com (I get my RAM from macsales also). Any of the major dealers are fine.
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I just bought 4 – 1.5 TB seagates and used a Caldigit Raid card and put them in Raid 5. Very fast! 300 MBps read/write.
They were $130 each with free shipping from Newegg. I have used Mwave in the past, I actually forgot about them until Michael mentioned them. They are a good company.
Get the 8-core. You will use it in the future and you can use it with compressor right now.
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What I’d add to this post either for you, or anyone else that stumbles onto this post is this – check your cards, and do some checking.
I made the mistake of asking the people at the Apple Store if everything I had would be compatible with a new Mac Pro rather than looking into things myself. But, as I was upgrading from a G5 Mac to the new dual quad 2.26 Nehalem – this meant going from PCI to PCI Express – and none of my cards fit.
This meant that my £2500 Mac ended up costing £4200 by the time I added the new Fibre channel and new Decklink HD card.
Which was nice…
Still, I can sell the old 2.7 dual with the Celerity Fibre Channel and Decklink HD card at one point…
Just make sure it all fits first. That’s my advice.
John
John Steventon
JKL Editing
http://www.jklediting.com
“Success is merely a failure to imagine more…”
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