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Help choosing Powermac for Final Cut

M

me262

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 6, 2007
29
0
CT, USA
Hi,
I recently got enough money to by a referbished Powermac for my starting out edditing buisness. Right now we use a mac mini G4 with 512megs of ram(its bad) and a macbook ro with 2gb of ram and a 2.16GHz proccesore.(It runs really fast) Anyway i want a stationary desktop to do my edditing on and i dont want to buy a mac pro because of price and i really dont like the type of ram it uses. So here are my thoughts for an editting ccomputer and i would like your help in making my desition.(Oh and if it matters i will be edditing HD Films on it)

Power mac Dual Proccesor G5 at 2.5Ghz
2.5gb of ram
250Gb HD
ATI 9650 vid card
Price is about $1900

Powermac Dual core G5 2.3GHz
2Gb of Ram
250Gb HD
Nvidia 6600le
Price is about $2000

eather one is fine for me i just want somthing that will outperform my macbook pro and allow me to retire my mac mini.
Thank you for your help. Oh and des ram really make a huge differance in final cut pro from 2gb to 4gb.
 
A

Allotriophagy

macrumors 6502a
Sep 5, 2006
917
0
Have a look at the refurbished machines. Is buying a PPC machine just to save $200 worth it in the long run? Seems a bit of a false economy to me.

Also, you could consider the iMac range. Just get some FW800 drives and an external monitor with the money you save.
 
FF_productions

FF_productions

macrumors 68030
Apr 16, 2005
2,822
0
Mt. Prospect, Illinois
At that price range, I'd get a Mac Pro (as mentioned before, try refurb), you are future proofing yourself and you get a faster machine.

The Dual 2.5 was liquid cooled, and for what I've heard about it, it doesn't last long for some unlucky people.
 
MovieCutter

MovieCutter

macrumors 68040
May 3, 2005
3,342
2
Washington, DC
If you truly are cutting HD films, and plan on doing any rendering at all, you'll want to go with a Mac Pro as it is faster than the Power Mac in Final Cut Pro and will get even faster as the Intel code gets better and once Final Cut takes advantage of more than 2 processors, likely in the next revision. You're wasting your time even looking at a PPC based Mac, especially considering the storage expansion on the Mac Pro and the better expansion design. You're letting RAM dictate the decision for the machine overall seems a bit foolish to me.
 
FF_productions

FF_productions

macrumors 68030
Apr 16, 2005
2,822
0
Mt. Prospect, Illinois
MovieCutter said:
You're wasting your time even looking at a PPC based Mac, especially considering the storage expansion on the Mac Pro and the better expansion design. You're letting RAM dictate the decision for the machine overall seems a bit foolish to me.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I switched to Intel just a few days ago because it reallly isn't worth investing in PPC anymore (it hurts to say that).
 
L

ljones

macrumors regular
Oct 2, 2006
232
0
Atlanta, GA
THings are much faster and responsive on a Mac Pro. And that comes immediately after switching from a G5 to a Mac pro at work.

I have Final Cut on my mac pro at home, and it runs super fast and clean.

Not to mention how fast things render. That alone makes the Mac pro more worthwhile. Although i was working on a 1280 x 720 project using the animation codec. So... i guess that would make the G5 chug.
 
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