5punk

I know this may fall on deaf ears a little, but I need a bit of help sinking my hard-earned money into one of the new Mac Pros that just came out. No getting into the get argument of Mac vs Pc, I need a mac for Logic to do my course (and hopefully job) and I'm happy with the faggotry, it's just a case of how badly I want to be shafted by apple and with which colourful dildo.

Basically it's fallen between the Quad and the Oct. I'm under the belief (right or wrong) that the quad will be snappier in the short term but under logic I'll generally have less track to use, say 50 in total, compared to 70. Logic isn't the greatest at sharing the load between cores apparently so it makes slightly more sense to have more ghz per core, rather than more cores respectively. So the Oct would be a little slower, but it would take more demanding use.

There's about a £200 price difference between the two, and these are the differences:

Quad: can take only 16gb max memory, 3.2ghz x 4 cpu "nehalem"
Oct: can take up to 32gb mem as it has 8 lanes rather than 4 for expansion, the cpu is the newer 2.4ghz x 8 "westmere" chip.

I'm getting either one with 8gb of ram and the HD5870 so there's not big difference that end of things, it just comes to the case of is it sensible to buy older (but more responsive, i think) architecture or a newer one that can do some heavy lifting. I'm undecided whether the RAM expandability is a big thing for me as I doubt over 16gb will ever be of use/affordable.

There is the wild card of the new Hexcore, which is 3.33ghz, but that comes with the standard amount of RAM as the quad (so it'd be even more expensive to get it at 8gb) and would be a good £100 more than the oct, with half the RAM.

I R CONFUS.

Can't you put osx on a proper computer these days?

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:Can't you put osx on a proper computer these days?

It's possible but it sounds like Sol is concerned about his application making the best use of the hardware, so a non-proprietary build may not be the best solution. It could work out perfectly but you don't know until you've spent your money and put it together.

Personally I don't know much about the serious Macs. And I wouldn't want to spend all that money to find out.

spoodie wrote: It's possible but it sounds like Sol is concerned about his application making the best use of the hardware, so a non-proprietary build may not be the best solution. It could work out perfectly but you don't know until you've spent your money and put it together.

Indeed, but it also appears to be that he's stuck between 3 options, all of which would be a half hour job to upgrade between on a not a mac, hence my question. doesn't seem right to me to have to select a compromise when you can't upgrade later.

Get the pink one.

We're technical experts, us.

A hacktintosh was an option a while ago but it tends to fuck the sound drivers about, and i really can't be fucked to deal with compatibility issues, so it's pretty much out. Plus the pro at least has a bit of resale value going for it.

What are you using now? Are you going to be able to tell that your new Oct-Core is a bit sluggish or is it still going to be blasing fast compared with what you're used to? If you aren't going to be able to tell, the performance you'll gain later when the software catches up with multi-core utilization might be worth it.

At home i'm using a 2.16ghz dual core macbook, but at uni we're using quad core pro's. Not sure how fast they are, but damn anything is faster than my three year old macbook.

The more I've thought about it today, the more the hex core has seemed attractive. I'm only really going to spend this kind of cash on a mac once in blue moon, so i might as well get the most future proof one i guess.

The geekbench scores are looking very conclusive:

Hex

Quad

But how well that translates into the real world...

Well, i bought the Hex, it was another £200 cheaper with uni education discount rather than standard education discount so it would have been silly not to.

Sol wrote:Well, i bought the Hex, it was another £200 cheaper with uni education discount rather than standard education discount so it would have been silly not to.

Is there a hole to drop another processor into later on, or do Macs not work like that and explode if you open the case?

If so, you've got potentially the top of the range one later, should you need it.

Not on the hex, but on the oct core I could have replaced them yeah. However I can always swap the motherboard tray out...

But that will mostly be way ahead int he future. I'm more than happy with 6x3.33