[Kelvin Schutz]

You could always go the Hackintosh route to save lots of money if you really need to work on a Mac OS. They do run on x86 architecture! In a few weeks, Intel has the Q9000 series of quad cores coming out. 12MB L2 cache, 45nm die, support for SSE4 instruction (mostly beneficial for encoding, but its a big benefit at that!). DDR2 ram is insanely cheap, easy enough to find 8GB for less than $200. Seagate has some new 32MB buffered drives that are performing more like 10K Raptor drives. And if you would also like to run XP or Vista (or not vista 🙁 ) its not impossible to dual boot both OSX and Windows.

This is a great thread by the way, definitely going to start utilizing some of the setting in AE and pay more attention to preview settings. I’m definitely going to give Nucleo Pro a run. I’m looking at building a PC in the next couple weeks so I’m eager to finish a project I’ve started.