Quad Nehalem vs. Used Octad

[silvel2edge]

I'm curious what you guys would recommend for what I plan to be using a mac pro for.

I do not do 3d design really, though I might dabble in photoshop for fun. The main reason I want a mac pro is for storage space and to play games on. I want to use a GTX285 and I also want to run vmware fusion full time. I'd like to have OS X be my main os with Windows 7 and Ubuntu running in the background. So basically i'm not sure if it's better to have like four cores dedicated to Windows 7/Ubuntu while i have my other set of cores dedicated to OS X?

Also, I'm thinking about waiting until the next Mac Pro update, which I think they might introduce Intel's new chip and you'd probably see 6 core and 12core versions.

 

[zmttoxics]

Both are swank machines. I would get the last gen model, over all a cheaper machine and still plenty fast.

 

[seisend]

well you can always wait, and they will be faster faster and faster.
u can always wait for things, even you'll need to wait until you die.
do you need a mac pro now ? yes, then get that thing. you won't see new models this year. If you only play games and photoshop stuff, I would get the Mac Pro 2.93 Quad Core . If you play hardware intense games like crysis , VMWARE will screw it cause of the perfomance lack so you'll automaticly start windows via bootcamp and the nehalem Quad Core processors will do their job more than great.

 

[gugucom]

It does not sound like you need a top performance machine, but 75% would be good enough. In that case general wisdom is that used machines are better value for money. If you run out of oompf in one or two years you can allways sell and buy a top line model. Personally I have bought a 2006 Quad cheap and have invested around 2300 $ for the machine including going octad and all the upgrades in my sig. I guess that there are very few jobs that would exceed the capability of the machine and those would all be in high end commercial or scientific work. With a 64-Bit operating system it scores near 20,000 in Cinebench 10. So your brief would not make this Mac Pro sweat.

 

[silvel2edge]

So would my virtual machines not be that cpu intensive while still having plenty of oomph in OS X if I just went quad nahalem? I am definately going to wait until Jan/Feb to buy regardless because i'm buying my wife and I a couple of the 13.3" unibodies for now.

So in Jan/Feb I think i might have more options for used 8 core vs. new quad or six core or whatever they'll have then.

 

[Tesselator]

If i wanted to run VMs I would go for the 2008 octad models. And, yeah, you assign 4 to the VM and used 4 on OS X basically. Or 2 to Ubuntu, 2 to XP, and 4 for OS X.


I dunno if we'll see six cores in the next Macs or not but Intel is planning on embedding a GPU pretty soon. That might be interesting.