PT HDX Systems going with the MAC Pro 2007 2007 1.1?

[PaulV]

So officially, Avid doesn't support running HDX in the Harpertown Macs, so if you try it things are acting unreliably, Avid Customer Support won't be able to help you. Have to say that first.

Here are the details of the issues with those machines:

The trouble seems to be caused by unreliable communication on the PCI bus on these machine's motherboards. Apple fixed it in the subsequent Macs (Nehalem and Westmere-based Mac Pros), and it was too much trouble for Avid to work around since they didn't make the machines anymore. Similar issues affect the HD Native cards too.

So there is firmware that lives on the HDX cards themselves. With 10.1 and future Pro Tools updates, PT updates that firmware that lives on the cards. If the PCI traffic gets interrupted along the way it can cause the firmware updating to fail, which can either make it take a really long time (retrying), or fail entirely, in which case you can have a board that's not recognized anymore. Now this isn't actually fatal for the board, because there's a firmware reset switch on it which will re-load the important parts of the original firmware that it shipped with so you can try to update again (preferably on another machine!).

So if you get past the firmware update, it will generally work OK most of the time (you might not even notice any problems). The issues we saw with the Harpertowns would show up during regular operation in the form of occasional hardware communication issues, which manifest as plug-ins failing to load and strangeness when doing things that create new mixers on the card, such as assigning outputs or sends; it could also affect automation and plug-in / mixer controls not behaving as expected. None of these will damage the card as far as I know, but they're a little disconcerting, and if you're spending this much on a system, it doesn't seem worth potentially wasting the effort of dealing with issues like this, IMO.

So hopefully that's enough info to make an informed decision about it all.