Switch from mac G5 (PCIx) to a PC?

[Tiki King]

I have only owned Macs. However I am considering buying my first PC to run my PT HD2 PCI-x system.

I have accepted the fact that I have to spend at least $2500 to upgrade my G5 to a new Mac Pro. The increase in power will be worth every penny. But I can't justify spending $2700 for new digidesign cards that do not add one once of power to the system. I am also not going to spend $1700 on a Magma chassis for the same reason.

Then it hit me. I can buy a PC with the same Xeon chipset for about $1000. It will have the same power for 1/5 the money.

Honestly I would prefer to stay with Apple. I was hoping that digidesign would offer more for $2700 like plugins or HD2 to HD3. Something so I could call it an upgrade rather than a crossgrade.

Has anybody done this. How easy is it for an Apple fanboy to switch to a PC? I assume all my plugins will still work. I am researching it now. I will mostly be recording music. I will have to use an email program. As I often email my work. I will have to network and use iDisk? Does the PC use AIF's?

Is there an unforeseen problem?

[AREED]

I am considering the same thing. I am giving it 6 to 12 months before I make a move.
Computers are a moving target and Apple is just to much $$$.
Having PCIx cards myself, its a tough call.

[Tiki King]

I am making the move pretty soon. My G5 is crawling. Even surfing the web is a drag. I love PT8 but it is crashing quite a lot.

Anyone here gone to the dark side. Will I be happy with PT8 on a PC?

[TOM@METRO]

You will likely be happy if you build it yourself and pick the right parts. Go over to the LE side and check out the i7 sticky at the top of the page. There is a lot of info that will serve in this endeavor.

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=238426

[Audiofarm]

If you have a G5 do yourself a favour and stick to PT7.4/Tiger. Works like a champ. I'm planning for a second computer with Kore2 for running VI's/sample libraries.

[ALEP]

It's a tough one.
I'm in a similar boat and have been looking at the idea of a hackintosh or alternative chassis (see the alternative to Magma thread).
The main thing that is putting me off the i7 build is that I keep getting work arriving in Logic sessions. That and the fact that I use my apple account to sync things from home.

A few people appear to have had success with this. You can stick it in a rack case or they sell it in an unpowered box. Powered it should run just like the 64bit PCI slots on a standard motherboard.If you cut back on ur spend or say preinstalled RAM from apple surely this can fit in to your budget with a new mac?

Not that I have anything against PCs. If only digidesign took the leap into the general unix world that nvidia have done. *sigh*

Good luck with what ever route you take though!

[drenkrom]

This is entirely anecdotal, but I worked for two 10-hour days on a PC-based PTHD8 system a few weeks back and the thing was very stable, I'd dare say as stable as my neatly-groomed G5 7.4/Tiger systems here. The owner of the system is very IT-savvy and his system is super lean and mean, so it may not be representative of the average PC PT rig.

So it is possible to set up a rock-solid PC rig, but there may be more technical knowledge involved in getting it solid, considering the huge array of possible hardware configurations. And forget Hackintosh altogether. Apple has made it clear with Psystar that those will never be a sound investment.

Aside from the technical aspects, you seem well imbedded in the Mac ecosystem, and the workflow changes would be major. If you forget money and processing power for a minute, would you go over to PC willingly? If that question gets a good belly laugh or a "heck no!" out of you, I'd seriously reconsider the venture.

Decisions decisions... this is a hard one indeed.

[hummerZ]

I've never really understood the aversion to PT on PC. It's the same DAW.

It's one thing to resist a PC for everyday "lifestyle" computing, but I use my DAW for Pro Tools, and that's largely all I use it for. The only reason I haven't migrated is the lack of affordable video-out options on PC. (post)

I also think that hackintosh is a viable solution, provided you are a little tech savvy (we all are, right?) and don't mind a bit of trial, error, and tweaking. The fact that Apple put a stop to Psystar is completely irrelevant; build your own...

"sound investment?" What does that mean? Do you mean that it would lack customer support?

Right, because Apple's customer support is sooooo great.

You know, Apple used to be the alternative "creative" solution, but as time goes on, they seem more and more evil empire. And Apple fanboy-ism is becoming annoying.

I like the 'tools on Linux idea! You'd think that it wouldn't be such a stretch, OSX is a BSD, after all.

[ALEP]

I love Linux. So many labs now running on it. I mean if digi wanna stay closed source as possible they could simply put out supported drivers for say debian and compile PTHDX.X themselves. Some whizz might even make a media worker friendly gui or an ubuntu setup just for the production rooms. There's gotta be a whole lotta people in the "I like the stability that unix brings to mac but not the fact that they've forsaken the previous core market of audio and video production for the "iX" market". If the driver alone existed you might even be able to get PT to run in something like WINE.

On a rant, it appears that the new mac business model does require the excruciating mark up they have on generic hardware. If there are a lot of hackintoshes appearing then they will have to rethink their business model entirely and revert to something like before where they built integrated solutions for specialists (and no mac no longer do integrated solutions, they just use generic and by means of their EFI, try to prevent this from being broken).

I sadly believe they have shot themselves in the foot however, as the intergrated soltuion market is strong but only for specialists which means limit growth in non specialists markets. Once you enter an entirely public domain you have to deal with the pressure that comes with it and mac are failing. Most of us on here will pay at least $150 to mac support per year and know that they are absolutely useless as they have limited/no knowledge and appear to simply work on a tick box solution method ("if fix1 doesn't solve try fix2, 3, 4, n+1").

I've seen 2 exceptionally stable HD rigs running leopard (not snow leopard yet) in pro studios. As stable as PC or a newly updated mac.

All that aside however, there is no one Hacktechsupport to shout at when something goes wrong and you may find yourself posting on 5 different forums and awaiting an answer for the OSx86 community.

For the anti Hackint0sh folk, Think of applemac like this: if you buy a sony vaio for your home entertainment then sony gives you a generic pc in one their own pretty boxes with their software preinstalled. they can support you perfectly well for what comes out of the box, but nothing more. No one can sell a machine that says Vaio on it with the sony management software and preinstalled sony drivers and claim it is a Sony clone- Bad Psystar, bad!. They can however give you the same motherboard, ram, drives, screen, OS and non Sony software in another machine with their own brand. Im sure MSFT would love to lock their OS to just Intel and have some kind of agreement that only Asus could put out their machines. This would guarentee price fixing and make for a much stabler windows environment. But thanks to anti competition laws there is no way that such a coalition could exist. Apple are trying their hardest to prevent the installation of OSX on non apple hardware to avoid a loss of revenue from their markup, that is all. Yes, if every1 has a hackintosh, OSX will double in retail price due to the decline in apple machine sales, but it will open us up to some far better premade unix based audio workstations from boutique companies.

All that aside make your choice based on what you're willing to compromise:

1. If you like OSX cos of its simplicity and want a new applemac then you'll have to either pay for an expansion chassis or new DSP cards. Se my previous reply for cheaper alternatives to Magma.

2. If you dont care about your OS and can drop some stability then your answer is an off the shelf audio PC with Windows (there are plenty of firms out there that make them).

3. If you're willing to look at you upgrade as a learning process and have a more powerful machine and you like OSX then H4ckint0sh. They work but updates can effect stability more than on a regular mac and you are more limited on hardware than on a PC. This will be overall the cheapest option but again they'll be no carillion/apple tech support to complain to when you're upgrade's resulted in all your drivers dissappearing and 1 of you pci slots going AWOL.


Personally if I had the budget I'd go for a macpro with a magma PE6NE in my own rack case in which I'd also mount some removable drive slots and FW ports to keep my project "brain" in one neat little box.

Happy updating!!!

[closetotheedge]

All are tough decisions!

And Digi doesn't make it any easier with no updates to the HD platform in like 5 years with no hint of when (if ever) this will be....... The future "looks bright for PT" but no mention of HD

Why the Magma 2 slot couldn't be a 64 bit, 66MHz box I don't know. To go all the way to a huge 7 slot expansion chassis made no sense for me.

Thinking that it couldn't be more than a year away I did an experiment and built a quad core H*&^ last March. A few issues running HD2 but no show stoppers. Now almost a year later I will either build and i7 H(*&^ or maybe go down to HD1 (crossgrade) and go back in the "approved fold"......

I always said I could just switch my built machine over to Windows and go legit.... but after 14 years of Macs and PT I really don't want to change......

Use W7 all the time too, not bad but...... you know all the rest....

Good luck..