mac pro 2x dual core xeon at 2.66 ghz

[AxeDye]

Alright so after tons of thinking i have decided to get one of these older mac pro as they go at a decent price on ebay. I will be getting it with 4gb of ram and a 250 gb hard drive. It comes with no OS but i will be installing snow leopard as well as adding 2x 500 gb hard drives. One will be for sessions and the other will be for multimedia like music, movies and samples for logic and pro tools. So my q is...

Do these older mac pros run ok for pro tools 9? As i will be getting 9 about a week after i get the mac.

[thin ice]

I didn't realise that my Mac Pro had become so old, but it works well with PT9. I have 4 500g drives in it and 5 gig of Ram.

[MarkH]

Are you referring to the Mac Pro based on the Intel Woodcrest Xeon processor? Those are definitely still workhorses. I use my MBP Core2Duo quite a bit because I travel, but I've also considered picking up a dual dual-core Woodcrest based Mac Pro since they go for just over $1,000 on ebay compared to the single quad Nehalem which goes for $1,800+ on ebay.

[seek]

I love my 2x dual core mac pro tower (2.66).

Works flawlessly and is plenty fast and customizable. I have 5gb of ram and 4 hard drives installed.

Best computer I have ever had! Happy camper here.

[HD2]

I purchased one from a friend a couple of months ago for $800 and it works great. I would recommend getting a new boot drive as well as the storage you are buying. I put in 3 seagate 1.5 TB drives and a WD 1 TB for the boot drive which I partitioned to 300 and 700 gb and put all the program loops etc on the 700 gb section. Then I did a software raid 0 for two of the 1.5 TB drives for video editing and the 3rd 1.5 TB drive is for protools sessions.
Just make sure you don't buy "green" drives as they run at around 5900rpm.

[AxeDye]

you guys have no idea how much your responses have made my early morning, thank you

yea it's a no brainer and i know they will still be available around my tax return. can't wait to put together my pro tools 9 rig.

[acmost]

Originally Posted by seek

I love my 2x dual core mac pro tower (2.66).

Works flawlessly and is plenty fast and customizable. I have 5gb of ram and 4 hard drives installed.

Best computer I have ever had! Happy camper here.

Same here...PT HD2 on it, it does crash way less (for me) with PT9 than PT8. This is a fact.

[GORILLA]

I have one and it's awesome!! Just upgraded to OSX 10.6.3 for Pro Tools 9. I'm coming back to Pro Tools
Also grabbed 3 new Western Digital Cavair Black 1Tb 64mb cache drives and a 500Gb WDC Black 64mb cache drive for the OS! Runs like a raped Ape

8G ram

[firebass305]

I occasionally use my wife's white MacBook for editing if I want to get out of the studio and change some scenery - and it's a 2.4 GHz machine with 2 GB of RAM and it runs PT 9 like a champ. AND I edit off the internal drive (yes, I am fully aware of how bad that is, but I really don't care) because it doesn't have a FireWire input. . . you still want to know if that Mac Pro can run PT 9?

[seek]

I thought I would add one more thing...

I bought mine used for super cheap but the guy before me managed to blow out all the firewire inputs. (Randomly a bus powered firewire drive will boot on one port but I dont even bother.)

I put in a PCIe firewire slot in the back (one recommended by digi and spec'd for video editing ect). Still non the less could not be happier.

I remember when troubleshooting I was told that it was most likely the logic board. Which to replace would be more expensive than I bought the machine for.

I guess long story short, because we all use firewire drives and interfaces BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR FIREWIRE PORTS! :) The issue seems to be common with these machines.