Please help me make the transition with a system recomendation

[indiochano]

Hello everyone, i have been a PC user for most of my life... I used to work with Macs back in the 90's... I had a power mac performa 6214CD but after a few years I made the switch to windows

I can't complain, but recently having a windows computer just isn't enough for the stuff I do (graphic design, motion graphics, and music, mostly with after effects, flash, photoshop, illustrator, reason, and logic)... I have a budget of about 5,000 dollars (plus student discount, but i dunno how much of a percentage the actual discount is...)

Anyway, I need you guys to help me out build a new system taking advantage of all of the components to further enhance the machine for greater stability and speed...

I am thinking of getting a 2.8 ghz 8 core mac pro, with 4 gbs of ram, an nvidia 8800 gfx card and the 3 year warranty which i think comes up to 3,600 dollars... for the monitors, i was thinking of getting two Acer 22" monitors (they're really cheap at newegg and I've got one right now and it seems to be fine at the moment)... the computer PLUS the monitors would come around 4000 dollars... I would like to keep it around 4,000 dollars as I want to keep the rest of the money into getting some audio equipment since I also make music (such as a MIDI keyboard from maudio)...

thank you very much in advance!

 

[surferfromuk]

Wow, sounds like your not going to know what's hit you with that setup...It's going to be awesome!...

If your buying Ram don't get it from Apple - you could probably buy 8G for the same money off the web...

 

[indiochano]

Wow, sounds like your not going to know what's hit you with that setup...It's going to be awesome!...

If your buying Ram don't get it from Apple - you could probably buy 8G for the same money off the web...

Thanks for the reply! Yes, I can't wait to see what that beast will be able to do...!

So are you saying that I should get the Mac Pro with the least amount of ram (ie, 2gb)?

If so, do you know any vendors that sell high quality mac pro compatible ram (low latency and stable) for really cheap?

Thanks!

 

[p.luik]

buy the memory from http://macsales.com, it's just as good as from apple. Also, I am a college student but did not get the student discount when I bought my mac pro in january. Apply for an ADC Student membership for $99. Your mac with the 2 GB of ram plus 2 GB from macsales.com would cost about $2720 plus $99 for the membership.
ADC Student Membership: http://developer.apple.com/products/student.html
ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store: http://developer.apple.com/membership/usa.html (Click on link from this site)

 

[indiochano]

buy the memory from http://macsales.com, it's just as good as from apple. Also, I am a college student but did not get the student discount when I bought my mac pro in january. Apply for an ADC Student membership for $99. Your mac with the 2 GB of ram plus 2 GB from macsales.com would cost about $2720 plus $99 for the membership.
ADC Student Membership: http://developer.apple.com/products/student.html
ADC Hardware Purchase Program Store: http://developer.apple.com/membership/usa.html (Click on link from this site)

Thanks for the quick reply!
I will definitely give that a try!

How about the video card though? I've been hearing that the ATI works better than the nvidia card? is that true?

 

[p.luik]

Ive never had any problems with my 8800. You said you did some graphics stuff, so Im gonna assume that you might use photoshop. If youre going to have this computer for a long time, which I dont know why you wouldn't, you will want the 8800. More and more apps will start to use the GPU for graphics processing so the benefits of the 8800 will really start to show. I bought my mac pro with the ati card and it was like a whole new computer when i got the 8800 when using aperture and motion. I hope this will help you.

 

[indiochano]

awesome, thanks for the help!!