Well, I bit the bullet so to speak - and purchased a second hand Mac Pro yesterday, 5,1. I have been very hesitant, due to the rumoured upgrades, and already owning a mini. And the mega cost involved. But... I'm absolutely over the moon with it. I've come to realise in a short time the cost of the thing has many other benefits which you don't realise until it's in place, and set up. Such as now, all my old boxes of PC stuff, cables, dvd drives, spare cpu's, motherboards are going in the bin (or ebay) The clutter that is about to be gone is huge!! 15+ years of collected PC components... That's basically getting the spare room back!
Now onto the important bits - dual cpu 2.4, 16GB ram, 5770. Geeks at a little over 12900. I've already added in a dvd drive and filled all the internal disk slots. The internal raid is faster than I was expecting! 3x2tb disks pulling 300-350MB/s read/write. (striped - I have two separate backups running nightly/weekly)
Compared to my PC... Well, I had a heavily overclocked i7, running around 4Ghz, 24GB ram, SSD's etc. I don't really care what a lifehacker article says, the pro *i have* feels faster than any PC I've owned. Safari opens blindingly fast, finder, all the day to day tasks are instant. Not just fast, but instant. VLC is happy playing large files (never was on my PC, had to use an expensive 3rd party program) Encoding is done overnight now, instead of taking triple that. I used to have an intel server board 10 years ago, which I ran Windows 2000 on - this 'feels' similar, it's like there are less bottlenecks, or something.
And don't hate me - I had to pop Windows 7 on it for my occasional skirmish into Lotro
Gotta relax somehow
Nox
Now onto the important bits - dual cpu 2.4, 16GB ram, 5770. Geeks at a little over 12900. I've already added in a dvd drive and filled all the internal disk slots. The internal raid is faster than I was expecting! 3x2tb disks pulling 300-350MB/s read/write. (striped - I have two separate backups running nightly/weekly)
Compared to my PC... Well, I had a heavily overclocked i7, running around 4Ghz, 24GB ram, SSD's etc. I don't really care what a lifehacker article says, the pro *i have* feels faster than any PC I've owned. Safari opens blindingly fast, finder, all the day to day tasks are instant. Not just fast, but instant. VLC is happy playing large files (never was on my PC, had to use an expensive 3rd party program) Encoding is done overnight now, instead of taking triple that. I used to have an intel server board 10 years ago, which I ran Windows 2000 on - this 'feels' similar, it's like there are less bottlenecks, or something.
And don't hate me - I had to pop Windows 7 on it for my occasional skirmish into Lotro
Gotta relax somehow Nox