2010 Mac Pro or Maingear

[flyingphish]

I have a 6 core mac pro coming. It will be replacing my 2008 imac.

I also have a 2008 Maingear F131 (Q6600, 9800GX2 1gb vcard) I use for gaming.

Would you:

1. Run the Mac Pro and the Maingear side-by-side and get a really nice KVM switch (can someone recommend one for me?)

or

2. Run the Mac Pro as my photo/video rig and gaming rig installing windows7 on the ssd that will be sitting in the optical bay. bootcamp does that for me correct? just run bootcamp and itll ask for the window7 disk, itll make its own partition (i dont make the partition in disk utility correct?), and install it to the same ssd that osx will be on? i could put windows7 on its own disk i gather.

I am hard pressed to stuff my new mac with a bunch of pc garbage, anti virus, etc. Id prefer a clean machine. I see a lot of people in the windows forum that are having issues. But then again a lot of you have none.

thank you in advance

 

[Transporteur]

Personally I wouldn't waste expensive SSD space for Windows if you only intend to use it for gaming.
A dedicated internal or external disk is what I'd do.

Depending on which graphics card you bought for your Pro, it might be unnecessary to keep another (possibly way slower) machine for gaming. You could do both work and gaming with just the Mac.

 

[AnimaLeo]

I'd say if you already have a decent PC you may as well keep it for gaming and other Windows related endeavors.

 

[Inconsequential]

Seems utterly pointless having two computers especially as the 5870 and the 6 core will wipe your other computer out of the water.

Sell the old one and dedicate a HD in the Mac Pro to gaming, it is what i've done.

 

[Matrixfan]

Not that easy...

The idea of a clean and simplified system is great and should be pursued. The new Mac Pro is promising with the 5870, but that is for now. The price of the 5870 won't be that great when the 6000 series arrives in 2 or 3 months. With the mac pro it is safe to assume that you will be stuck with the 5870 for a very long time. For work and pro apps it doesn't matter that much, but from a gaming perspective it does. If you keep the PC you can always upgrade at any point for the latest card if you need to. On the other side it can be said that the new MP with the 5870 is a reasonable top end gaming system now.

I have a 2008 MP 8x2.8 MP (best value ever) and a gaming pc: E8500@4Ghz, 4GB. 1GB 4870. I am also frustrated to have 2 systems. In addition to that Apple cards are not easy to get where I live and european Apple prices really suck. The Apple 5870 here is 568 USD. I am also not sure if the 2.8 Ghz CPU would bottleneck the 5870...

 

[flyingphish]

thanks for the replies.

i did order the 5870.

well if my new macpro will wipe my maingear out of the water i may as well take it to work to replace my ailing velocity micro.

ill throw windows7 on one of the harddrives.

i do plan to run 3x2tb in raid 0 on the remaining 3 drives. isnt there a problem with windows7 and raid? i know if i install in a certain way there will be none, ie:

1 new mac arrives
2 install ram, ssd, remove 1tb harddrive.
3 power on, install SL install disk, not sure what happens next but i think it initialize ssd, disk utility, no partion, name it "mac boot", and then it installs SL?
4 turn mac off, install 4 new harddrives.
5 power up, initialize, disk utility, set up raid.

ok now that i am up and going, start botcamp and itll partition and install to the drive of my choice?

seems easy.

 

[Transporteur]

No there is no problem with Windows 7 and RAID.
I've got a very similar disk setup and Win 7 works flawlessly.

1 new mac arrives
2 install ram, ssd, remove 1tb harddrive.
3 power on, install SL install disk, not sure what happens next but i think it initialize ssd, disk utility, no partion, name it "mac boot", and then it installs SL?
4 turn mac off, install 4 new harddrives.
5 power up, initialize, disk utility, set up raid.

Possible, but you can do it quicker.
Since OS X is already pre-installed in the stock 1TB disk, simply finish the installation on this drive.

So in short:

1. Finish installation of OS X on 1TB drive
2. Install CCC on OS X
3. Install RAM, other hard drives and SSD
4. Initialise SSD, set up RAID and clone 1TB drive to SSD
5. Reboot using the SSD as boot (hold alt-key after the startup sound and select the SSD)
6. Erase the 1TB drive
7. Start BootCamp assistant (it leads you through the installation, no point of explaining the process).