Help me configure a good priced Mac Pro *UK*

[Elven]

After many years gaming, and building gaming systems and using Windows on a whole I purchased a Macbook, this little notebook has done so much work for me, without even an hiccup it's stunning, the looks and general feel of it surprised me.

Anyways I digress, It is time to move on, I have spent too many late nights gaming away, learning nothing more than another tactical spot, and as such I am selling my Quad Core desktop for something more suited to just lazing about online, and beginning to work in Milkshape which a lot of modders in a community I am involved in use.

So can you help me spec up a Mac Pro, for under £2000 if possible with enough power to run a 3D Rendering Application, a Photoshop Application * say CS3? * some audio editing, and also of course a few gaming applications under Windows XP Bootcamp?

I plan to keep my Samsung 204BW monitor as it will save a fair bit of cash until I can afford a Cinema display also their is chance of new models coming out.

Thanks all

 

[GoCubsGo]

The 2.8 should run just fine. Get the stock memory and buy 3rd party ram asap if you're going to be rendering. The 8800 card should also suit your needs. Everything else remains the same and add additional hdd storage as needed. I'm not sure if you need RAID, but I'm sure someone else chime in. Comes to £1,869.00 by my count.

 

[Elven]

I'm eager to hear about the performance differences between the single Quad Core over the 2xQuad Core both in OSX, and in rendering.

As for cost £1,800 sounds nice to me.

BTW if anyone wants to do swapsies on a high end gaming desktop hit my PM

 

[nick9191]

The next version of OS X due for release in April 09 has a new technology called Grand Central. This technology will allow regular applications and the OS itself to use multiple cores much more efficiently.

Have a read... http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/

I bring this up as I thought it might influence your decision on which model to buy.

 

[Umbongo]

Check the uk refurb store as there are both quad and eight core 2.8GHz for £200 and £250 off retail respectively.