Illegal.
It seriously bothers me these days when people recommend that as a serious replacement to a new Mac. If you can't afford it, then save your pennies.
It seriously bothers me when people get so bent out of shape on something so trivial.
its not like theyre reselling them or marketing them as whole solutions.
hardware is hardware; sure apple does a better job of integrating hardware with their software; but geez, alot of interesting things came from tapping into things like that...
So I have configured a Mac Pro with the following specs:
One Quad Core 2.8ghz CPU
2gb RAM (will buy 3rd party memory to upgrade)
1x500gb HD
8800gt
23" ACD
Airport card
Total price is $3172 (through my employer's EPP)
If I bump it up to 2x CPUs it goes up to $3632.
My question is if it's worth the extra $460 for 8 cores for the following usage:
Aperture
Light Photoshop
Logic Pro
Light Gaming (mostly WoW)
VMware (maybe 1-2 VMs running at once)
And all the other usual programs (itunes, firefox, etc)
Thanks
I say get the 4-core option; seriously who needs 8 cores?!
Who really even needs 4 cores?
even if Snow Leopard does take advantage of multicore architecture, it shouldnt matter how many cores you have, it should still be proficient enough to use the speed of a dual core or quad or even eight core system.
I run an 8 core at work and a 4 core at home.
the 4 core is blazingly fast, essentially if your running the same applications against both machines it wont really make a huge impact it iwll enhance the performance a bit but i think you should be lasting for quite sometime with the 4 core machine; saving 400-500$ is nice and getting a quality built machine like that for a little less is great.
I say get the 500GB drive as well because with the EPP and Apple Add-on and the price of OEM drives nowadays it evens out essentially. so no big loss there and the 8800 is cheaper the BTO way so thats a plus (besides its covered under apple care as opposed to buying afterwards and it not being covered)
so i think you got an ideal perfect solution set.