Sell "old" (August 08) Mac Pro to buy new one?

[analog guy]

Hi!
I purchased a Mac Pro 8-core (2 x 2.8 Quad-Core Xeon) in August 2008. I've been happy with it but am intrigued by the idea of the newest Mac Pros.

I currently have 10GB RAM, 5x500GB HDs, wireless, and the NVIDIA 8800 GT in there.

Should I consider selling my current Mac Pro (if so, how much?) in favor of buying one of the new 2x2.26 Nehalem-based machines?

I'm a user of PHotoshop, Logic/Audacity, business apps, and VMWare Fusion. I'm intrigued by the ability of the new processors to run emulation (Fusion) faster.

I'd be happy to move the HDs from the old machine to the new if it made sense.

Any ideas on how much the swap might cost? Any arguments in favor of or against making this switch?

I admit that part of it is novelty of something new -- but I also wonder if the newer Mac Pros will be much better poised for the future (3-5 years) and will take much better advantage of SL.

Thank you for your thoughts!

 

[chaosbunny]

If you have too much money and don't know what to do with it, why not.

I doubt you will see much difference though, I would not do it. Wait until your Mac Pro is 3 - 4 revisions behind.

 

[superpalmtree]

Hi.

I would definitely sell now and upgrade to the newest model. I would recommend selling soon...before all the reviews come out and people start thinking twice before buying old technology.

With your configuration as is: on eBay I would start the auction at $3799.99 - unless you need more. You could probably get $3799.99 with only 2 hard drives of the 5 installed. The 8800GT will entice buyers....but I would get it listed as soon as possible.....

I've sold 3 Mac Pro's recently...with just the default card, the one I sold 2 weeks ago I got $3399.99 and my others got $3299 each. They were just basic dual 2.8, 10GB RAM, 1TB HD, (no wireless, and stock video)

The previous poster who said to wait 3-4 revisions -- I would not recommend that. I have always sold/bought the newest model, hardly ever out anything. And your new resell value stays very high. And not everyone is like us....some people are content with buying and sitting on it for 3-4YRS, when you love technology and work with it for a living having the newest model is a must.

 

[sickmacdoc]

I've sold 3 Mac Pro's recently...with just the default card, the one I sold 2 weeks ago I got $3399.99 and my others got $3299 each. They were just basic dual 2.8, 10GB RAM, 1TB HD, (no wireless, and stock video)

Man, you need to share your secret for selling on eBay with the rest of us! Selling a $2799 computer with $300 bucks worth of add ons ($200 for 8Gb of added RAM and $100 for a 1Tb drive) for those prices? Wow- good job!

EDIT: BTW- I am not doubting you did that, just wondering how!

 

[analog guy]

Let's say hypothetically, if one could do the following for the same price (or nearly so):
a) sell a like-new 2x2.8 Mac Pro (10GB RAM, 1 or 2TB storage)
b) buy a 2x2.26 Nehalem Mac Pro

...would it be worth it?

In other words, will the Nehalem 2x2.26 outperform the "old" 2x2.8 on all tasks?

If I can upgrade for little to no money (hypothetically speaking), would it make sense to jump to the new architecture?

Or, to really get the performance increase does one have to step up to the 2x2.66 or 2x2.93 Nehalems (at much greater cost)?

Thanks!

 

[kastenbrust]

You use photoshop so provided your using CS4 the graphics card is more important to you than the processor, and for emulation it depends what you intend to do. If your just a light / medium user your Mac Pro is already total overkill for you, if you needed the nehalem architecture for processing you would already know about it. If your just using it to do a bit of logic work and some simple Photoshop edits even an iMac would do for you, however if your doing intense video encoding, final cut pro work with high def video on a tight schedule, and advanced graphical work on many layers in Photoshop and you absolutely need CS4 then you probably need a Mac Pro.

 

[clyde2801]

I'm in the middle of listening to last week's macbreak weekly, and leo is pondering the same thing, since he ordered a mac pro a few days before the new models came out.

I think the consensus (so far) is that the new machines have less of a bottleneck on the FSB, but not a whole lot of software is configured to take full advantage of all the cores.

Alex Lindsay suggested the new machines would be advantageous for him to buy with all of the final cut pro video work he does, and the rest of the panel were cautious about whether it would benefit their uses.

Perhaps the prudent thing to do would be to wait for some benchmarks comparing the two systems.