A change is as good as a rest!

[Monocle]

Thanks for all the forum advice chaps. Decision made. Tomorrow morning I'll be ordering a Quad Pro 2.93 with 6GB Memory, 640 GB HD (I'll purchase an additional larger drive later) with the upgrade to the Radeon 4870. Oh, and the 24" screen plus Applecare. Even with the education discount this comes to a frightening £3155! That's $5174!! I must be mad. Any objections just get them in by tomorrow morning! Dear God, please let this last me as many years as my dear old G4...

 

[AppleWorking]

Thanks for all the forum advice chaps. Decision made. Tomorrow morning I'll be ordering a Quad Pro 2.93 with 6GB Memory, 640 GB HD (I'll purchase an additional larger drive later) with the upgrade to the Radeon 4870. Oh, and the 24" screen plus Applecare. Even with the education discount this comes to a frightening £3155! That's $5174!! I must be mad. Any objections just get them in by tomorrow morning! Dear God, please let this last me as many years as my dear old G4...

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/691789/

 

[Monocle]

Thanks for the link AppleWorking. As it's 00.40am I think I'd best absorb all these additional facts tomorrow morning before I press the buy button!

Just to underline that the chunkiest app it'll be used for will be Logic Pro, followed by video production for a podcast (nothing epic!) and general use/web surfing. I'm looking for longevity and something that's going to be pacy enough to last me around 5 years. Out of interest, the only Octo I could afford would be the low end 2.26 model, which would cost me £3302 as opposed to £3155 for the 2.93 Quad. So a mere £150 difference - yet many of the tests I've seen seem to suggest that for 90% of everyday computing the faster Quad will outperform its big brother...

http://www.macworld.com/article/139507/2009/03/macpro2009.html

 

[Dr.Pants]

....yet many of the tests I've seen seem to suggest that for 90% of everyday computing the faster Quad will outperform its big brother.

Yep. It comes from programming - most programs cannot utilise multiple cores. Everything on the benchmarks page points where each system has their advantages - the quad has advantages in every single threaded app (although I do not understand compressor being up with the quad. WTH?! Or is it multithread non-aware, too?) The Octo has the advantage as for rendering the program is multi-thread aware, and can use all eight cores. The iMac has the advantage in heavily processor-intensive tasks that do not require massive access to the memory, where the FSB/QPI do not play a huge role.

Logic, though should utilise more then on core, but coming off of a G4, anything current will be nice

 

[VirtualRain]

Thanks for all the forum advice chaps. Decision made. Tomorrow morning I'll be ordering a Quad Pro 2.93 with 6GB Memory, 640 GB HD (I'll purchase an additional larger drive later) with the upgrade to the Radeon 4870. Oh, and the 24" screen plus Applecare. Even with the education discount this comes to a frightening £3155! That's $5174!! I must be mad. Any objections just get them in by tomorrow morning! Dear God, please let this last me as many years as my dear old G4...

Good choice!!!

 

[Monocle]

Dash it - a few hours delay! Forgot to tell the bank that they are about to get a rather frightening hit from my plastic card. Thankfully they've been red hot on questioning transactions that might be fraudulent and I would have hated them to put a stop on my account. Ah well, a few more hours will make little difference...

Whilst I'm waiting, have any of you chaps used the 'One to One' service? Waste of money unless you're a complete beginner or a great investment?

 

[surflordca]

Dash it - a few hours delay! Forgot to tell the bank that they are about to get a rather frightening hit from my plastic card. Thankfully they've been red hot on questioning transactions that might be fraudulent and I would have hated them to put a stop on my account. Ah well, a few more hours will make little difference...

Whilst I'm waiting, have any of you chaps used the 'One to One' service? Waste of money unless you're a complete beginner or a great investment?

Never used it but are you close to an store? If not, I don't think I would even consider it...

 

[Tesselator]

if "One-to-one" is Apple's consulting service then it just depends who the consultant is. As I hear it from very many people on-line tho the Apple Store "experts" are very often nincompoops. My own experiences are not dissimilar.