Conumdrum: New Mac Pro?

[lancemcv]

I have been going a bit nuts with this myself, but made a decision yesterday and bought a used OWC (yes OWC is selling used mac pros now FYI) 2009 Mac pro 8 core 2.93 ghz with 16 virtual cores and turbo boost up to 3.33ghz. which has a the Xeon 5570 chip. In Geekbench 64 bit multi cpu average score it comes in 5th and the 2010 mac pro 12 core comes in at #1 but the 2009 is the #1 8 core mac pro score, oddly the 2012 12 core mac pro come in just under the 2010 12 core. I also upped it from 16 gigs of ram to 32 gigs for $128 bucks. It's also cheaper than buying a new top imac.
I also bought a 250 gig Mercury Accelsior 2 for a boot drive which will be almost as fast as the New mac pros boot drive and has two Sata 6g ports.
My reasoning is mainly money. I almost always buy the second tear mac pros not the top and usually refurbished from Apple to save money. Also I don't like to buy the first version of any brand new product. The new macs only ship with Mavericks. So who knows when Avid will give the thumbs up on them.
I have a native pcie card with an Omni. This will hold me for at least a few years and its CPU is upgradable to twelve cores in the future if I want to do that but I don't see why I would, the cost is crazy. My total cost with the ram and Accelsior came in at $2450 compared with the lower end new mac pro which starts at 3000.00 and comes with 12 gigs of ram.
An 8 core new mac pro will most likely cost 4000.00 and you really don't need dual GPUs for Pro Tools. If you are doing video editing as well then yeah it be nice but thats a lot of bucks. I like the new design and I would love one but it's overkill for pro tools. Then if your an HDX user you will have to buy a 1000 dollar thunderbolt box or 300 dollar one for the Native card. It keeps adding up. I feel good about my decision. I also will add a blu ray drive to it as well for 50 bucks and down the road upgrade the video card to the same one that is in the new mac pro or better because by the time these things finally get to market there will be faster GPUs available and the new mac pros look like you will not be able to upgrade the GPUs but maybe you will not sure. AMD is realeasing one that only takes up one slot and is faster than any of the current ones available for the old mac pros. Yes I wont have USB 3 or thunderbolt but eSata 6g is fast enough. If I were loaded then yeah I would go for it. I will sell my older mac pro 2008 which has been good to me but the new setup will smoke it. So the upgarde will only coast me about $1,550 after I sell the old one. I will have more money for pro tools 11 plugin upgrades etc.
My job is supposedly going to by me the new macpro for work, so I will get to see the diff between the systems, It's overkill though as we will only use it to track not mix. So I think I will be good for a few years and will have more cash in the bank.

[propower]

^^^^^^^^^ Nothing wrong with this choice ^^^^^^^^^

For my own self I paid ~$200 ($2600) more but went with the imac in my signature - choosing HD Native Thunderbolt vs PCIe. We should compare notes in a years time .

[lampmusic]

Sounds like a good option for sure.

Thank God we still have options LOL

In the end it came down for us to Thunderbolt, not missing PCIE now that our HDN cards are sitting in OWC helios.

just my .02: we are not really liking Apples non-upgradeable directions that they have gone with on the MBPr. I know they are putting together machines that should be equipped for just about anything, but it goes against our old-school nature of being able to add more memory or HD when the need arises. Evidently they are wanting us to upgrade our whole machine in 2-3 year lifespan to take advantage of future tech lol

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by lampmusic

to take advantage of future tech

"I think we can all agree, the past is over!" George W. Bush (the stupider)

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by JFreak

"I think we can all agree, the past is over!" George W. Bush (the stupider)

Hahaha the W for sure !!!

Trust me best 5 minutes you will spend all week !!!!!


http://youtu.be/W_3xvXy9eVM

[CME]

Fwiw the nehalem and later mac pros can run up to 48 GB of ram with single core processors and 128 GB with dual processor models.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memor...ry#1066-memory

[corp]

Originally Posted by YYR123

Hahaha the W for sure !!!

Trust me best 5 minutes you will spend all week !!!!!


http://youtu.be/W_3xvXy9eVM

Here's some more.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4-AKcH3eC8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHIUdMVN_V0

Funny......

[corp]

Originally Posted by JFreak

"I think we can all agree, the past is over!" George W. Bush (the stupider)

The present is here (the stupider)

[Markrosoft]

I'm a little surprised at how few people seem interested in the new Mac pros. Am I missing something or is the new Mac Pro with HDN thunderbolt going to be a super powerful option?? That's not a rhetorical question... I'm genuinely curious.

Obviously the nMP's aren't going to work if you need a new computer tomorrow or next week but as someone else mentioned, PT11 should be running smoothly on mavericks and the nMP's within a few months. You gotta assume that Avid will make it a priority. Is it just that it will be more expensive than a tower/hackintosh/other Mac option?? My thinking is spending extra now should get me an extra year or two on the Mac Pro and therefore it's worth it.

A huge factor weighing against the MBP is fan noise for me. I'm upgrading from a MBP and I can't tell you how excited i am to get my computer (along with the accompanying hard drives) out of the room. For foley, ADR and recording vocals... It makes a big deal and I'm applying that logic to a pimped out iMac too... I just want it out of my room.

Anyway, everyone has different needs and I don't have an HDX card to house, so I'm super excited for nMB + HDN thunderbolt. Am I crazy?

[Mitchel]

Not crazy. I'm updating to new MPro soon. I'm currently running HD Native from MBPro. Bit fed up of lack of CPU.
It will be interesting to see how it all pans out...
I'm also looking forward to having the extra Thunderbolt ports that's for sure!