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IF you had to buy Sept 7th...

D

DZL

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 19, 2007
118
0
Pasadena, CA
O.k. - I'm pretty much dead-set on buying Sept 7th - with, or without an update to the mac pro.

My Dell just isn't doing the job anymore; and it's costing me time and money.

So, worst-case scenario - no update. My question is this: what configuration would you buy if you had to go with the mac pro? What processor, video card, hard drive, etc - would you purchase?

Also, I plan on buying something on Sept 7th, but if there's an update within the next 3-6 months, I will probably trade it in (powermax), and purchase the new updated mac pro; whenever that may be.

Thanks,

DZL
 
MM - more questions...

Multimedia said:
Pretty much confined to the 2.66GHz refurb for $2,199 plus tax with free shipping as the only way to go right now. Or a used one from somebody. Add in two 2GB sticks of ram from Omni for $300 with this link from Ramseeker.com. Fry's sells 500GB drives for $90 and 750GB for $190 now. So do that yourself as well. HP LP3065 30" monitors have a $100 rebate until Halloween - $1,350 from Tiger Direct now.
Click to expand...

Thanks, MM - I'm new to the macworld, so you'll have to tell me exactly what harddrive I should get - and why omni RAM, and not crucial?

Oh, and what video card would you go with?
 
For RAM, I recommend OWC.

For Hard Drives, Apple uses Seagate built in and they are really noisy but fast.

I have a Western Digital 400GB SATA drive in Bay2 and it is very quiet.

I have the 8 Core Mac Pro with 9GB of RAM
 
I've got a Western Digital Raptor (loud)
Western Digital 400 gig SATA - pretty quiet
Seagate 7200.10 SATA - also pretty quiet.

Seagates have a five year warranty though :D

Best pricing for drives is in the .22 - .25 cent per gig range.

As for the video card, hopefully Tuesday you'll have more options to think about :cool:
 
Raptors will be loud because they're 10k RPM :)
But those things are fast.
I love Seagate as much as Western Digital...and their warranty is pretty long. The loudness seems to be the issue because Seagate got sued for their AAM and they are not allowed to use it, but other manufacturers can.
 
Also a good place to do head-to-head comparisons of hard drives is:

http://storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr

Just hit the "sort" button. From there you can check off individual drives for comparisons. You can also choose from a myriad of testbeds (i.e. high-end drivemark, officemark2006, idle noise, avg. transfer rate, etc.)

:apple::D
 
DZL said:
Thanks, MM - I'm new to the macworld, so you'll have to tell me exactly what harddrive I should get - and why omni RAM, and not crucial?

Oh, and what video card would you go with?
Click to expand...

Omni sells "multimedia enhanced" memory, which is well suited for a multimedia operating system like MAC-OS.
 
DZL said:
My question is this: what configuration would you buy if you had to go with the mac pro? What processor, video card, hard drive, etc - would you purchase?
Click to expand...

If the Mac Pro is not updated and I seriously doubt it will be and
If I had to buy a Mac Pro tomorrow, I would get:

Two 3.0GHz Dual-core Intel Xeons. I wouldn't spend the extra money for the quad-core Xeons.
1GB of memory. I would buy 4 more GBs of memory from OWC.
250GB Hard Drive. I already have 3 SATA hard drives.
ATI Radeon X1900 XT video card. Don't much care for it but it's the best (consumer) video card available at this time.
And Bluetooth & Airport Extreme.
 
suneohair said:
Why pay more for the 3.0Ghz chips though?
Click to expand...

I play one game and one game only but it is very cpu and gpu intensive.
Believe it or not the extra clock speed would be of help.
If I was buying a Mac Pro tomorrow I would feel a little better getting the higher clock speed psychologically.
That sounds dumb but if I bought a Mac Pro tomorrow and new Mac Pros come out 2 or 3 or 4 months later
with better processors, at least I could say to myself that I got the best dual-core processors available.

But you also have to remember that I am not buying one tomorrow so it is a moot point.:)
 
Topper said:
I play one game and one game only but it is very cpu and gpu intensive.
Believe it or not the extra clock speed would be of help.
Click to expand...

I believe, it is just the price for them. But of course, you aren't buying now so that was just a hypothetical :D
 
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