[Justin1524]

Thanks everyone. Really good tips, especially Barry. I like the idea of buying locally if possible to avoid the heavy shipping charges (let alone potential damage during shipping). I'm holding out for that sweet deal.

I'm still a bit perplexed when it comes to the value of CPU speed and associated Geekbench single/multicore scores when it comes to Pro Tools and particularly latency when tracking through plugins. Suffice it to say that every detail matters to varying degrees. For example:

1.) Interface Speed - in my case Native HD card over digilink cable to a pair of digi 192 blue interfaces. How would Firewire 800, USB3 or Thunderbolt compare? A bit of a non-starter in my case because I really like my Digi 192 blues, they're an exceptional value on the used market right now. I also have such a great mix of IO right now with them, including analog, AES, SP/DIF and ADAT. No new interfaces offer this much, yet most people probably don't care. Any thoughts?

2.) CPU speed - 2.4, 2.66, 2.8, 3.33, 3.46 - to me differences matter a bit less here but I can't speak to this totally because I only really have experimented with a 2006 mac pro and 2008 mac pro. Thoughts on how much this aspect matters?

3.) Number of Cores - 4, 6, 8, 12? - I'd say this matters a lot for Pro Tools. More cores is better. Thoughts?

4.) RAM speed/Amount of RAM - yeah fast RAM is better and more RAM is better to a point. For me if you have over 20 GB you're fine unless you use huge samples on huge sessions.

5.) Hard drive speed - SSD's are without question the way to go for boot drives - do they matter much for working drives? Also worth it to get a PCIe card M.2 SSD drive and double speeds that are already pretty fast on the normal SATA bus?

6.) Graphics card power/speed. I'm less interested in this because I only need basic graphics supporting 1920 x 1080 resolutions.

7.) Computer's chipset speed - yeah here's a fun one. This kinda cuts to the whole architecture question, trash can mac vs mac pro tower.

It all adds up to a Geekbench score. And will we see greatly improved hardware out of Apple any time soon? I would say, probably not as the market for Apple is clearly less desktops and more mobile. Will prices come down on the trash can macs - sure they will - but feels like a slow drop right now. Meanwhile your 2012 and older mac pro towers will have hardware failures at some point, for example power supplies. And you don't want that during a critical session. Still I just love mine, feels like a sherman tank.