I'd been putting off buying a Mac Pro for work until the new update was announced. Now that it's turned out to be pretty much a non-update, I'm ready to bite the bullet. The Nehalems still seem a bit pricey to me, though, so I was looking at the used market. Turns out I can pick up an 8-core 2.8GHz Harpertown with 10GB of RAM for $2,000. I could buy a quad core Nehalem for not too much more than that, but I really think I want an 8-core system. For the work I do (a lot of video compression and effects rendering) I can regularly max out 8 cores without much effort, even hyper-threaded.
The Harpertown seems like a decent machine for a reasonable price. It doesn't look like there's much of a used market for the Nehalems yet, so including the RAM I'm probably going to have to pay about $1500 more to come to the 8-core Nehalem table. My gut feeling is to just buy the Harpertown, but the more I look at the specs it the more I think, "Boy, maybe I really CAN'T live without a system with hyper-threading and QPI".
I'm not interested in a Hackintosh for this. I've actually been using one at work for a while, but for various reasons I really need to step up and buy me a jen-yoo-wine Macintosh. So should I just pick up the Harpertown and be satisfied with that, or am I really going to regret not buying a Nehalem?
The Harpertown seems like a decent machine for a reasonable price. It doesn't look like there's much of a used market for the Nehalems yet, so including the RAM I'm probably going to have to pay about $1500 more to come to the 8-core Nehalem table. My gut feeling is to just buy the Harpertown, but the more I look at the specs it the more I think, "Boy, maybe I really CAN'T live without a system with hyper-threading and QPI".
I'm not interested in a Hackintosh for this. I've actually been using one at work for a while, but for various reasons I really need to step up and buy me a jen-yoo-wine Macintosh. So should I just pick up the Harpertown and be satisfied with that, or am I really going to regret not buying a Nehalem?
