Purchasing advice for a new Mac Pro

[cdolan92]

Hey, I'm looking to grab a Mac Pro for my office, and am in charge of researching the best options for the company. So far I've narrowed it down to a Hexa-core at the highest speed (3.33Ghz I think?), 1 Superdrive, the 1 TB HD that now comes standard, and the regular graphics chipset. This computer will mainly be used for:

Photoshop CS4
InDesign CS4
Dreamweaver CS4

Our website manager is currently using a 4-5 year old white iMac G5. His updates are getting brutally slow because of the hardware restriction, and the computer just needs to go. We are looking at the Mac Pro for the power, but also for its upgradability into the coming years.

Now, before i organize some information and present it to my boss, I was hoping to get some last-second opinions from you guys. Is that computer the best choice for heavy work in those programs? Can anyone clarify what a single-thread application is, compared to a multi-thread (I'm guessing those are 3-D rendering applications, such as AutoCAD)?

Any information is appreciated, as this is a potentially $3-5k purchase for a small, short-on-cash company

 

[Hellhammer]

Single-threaded app is an app that cannot utilize more than one core (i.e. thread). In those apps, the clock speed is crucial as it will speed up the process.

The base Mac Pro with 2.8GHz quad should be just fine though and it should be able to be upgraded to the 6-core from aftermarket, for less than Apple offers it. That has not been confirmed yet though so don't quote me on that. Remember to buy some extra RAM from aftermarket, that, if something, will speed up CS4.

 

[cdolan92]

Ok thanks for the help! The only reason I was discounting the quad cores was because it looked like they were the "sweet-spot" in terms of price and power. However, if we can get a quorum here that the cores will be upgradable to the Hex versions in the aftermarket, that is a very attractive option.

 

[sirnh]

I went with the hexacore, myself... but does the employee spend most of their time in photoshop or one of the other apps?

I don't believe InDesign or DreamWeaver will really take advantage of the additional 2 physical/4 logical cores. You might be able to save some money and get the 3.2 GHz 4 core Nehalem.

The $800 you save could be spent on a 3rd party SSD for OS/apps and 16GB of RAM, which will probably make a bigger difference in the employee's day-to-day work.

I also recommend the Western Digital RE4 2TB hard drive to store projects and other data.