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What are your reasons for buying a Mac Pro?

J

jjahshik32

macrumors 603
Original poster
Sep 4, 2006
5,366
52
I know there have been many threads such as this but thought I'd start another one.

What are your reasons for buying a Mac Pro as to everything else (imac, mac mini, macbook pro, macbook air)?
 
I promised myself I'd get a desktop machine when I finished grad school. Oh and I already had the 30" ACD so buying an iMac and losing 6" was not my idea of awesome. Frankly the iMac would suit much of my needs but the MacPro just lets me do more faster. Such as import hundreds of RAW files from a CF card then into Aperture, while ripping DVDs and running your standard iChat, Mail, Safari, etc. In addition to that making copies of said files to various external drives for redundancy purposes.
 
Performance; rendering speed and multithreading perform much better on 4/8/16 cores versus 2.

Expandability; Sure one can daisy-chain FW800 drives, but for an actual RAID array with expansion card, having the actual PCIe lanes for it are nice. Not to mention more then two monitors with additional graphics cards.

Serving; There are two BaseT LAN ports on the MacPro for a reason - port teaming. Not to mention other NICs (AFAIK) work in the MacPro as well, so one can read their RAID array from another computer and not suffer throughput problems (If two LAN ports weren't enough). Not to mention that port teaming and XGerve, IMO, work well together.
 
Always had a desktop PC and there was no way I was going to switch to an all-in-one like an iMac. I want the power and RAM expansion for Lightroom, and I need more than 1 internal hard drive for photo and file storage, so the Mac Pro was my only option!
 
VirtualRain said:
I've had it with Windows and it seemed like the next best choice! :D
Click to expand...

Hey virtual rain, you have the 2.26GHz 8 core nehalem? How does it fare against the 2.8GHz 8 core last gen?

Wait judging by your sig you have the 2.93GHz quad?
 
Well...

To be honest... the ex-wife got my Dell laptop!

I already have a 24" iMac, and a PC. I wanted a portable system that I could use that was not my work laptop. I didn't want anything big. The 13" MBP gave me the performance with minimal size/weight increase over a MBA.

Update: I thought this said MacBook Pro...

I had a PowerMac G5 tower (pre-cursor to the Mac Pro). I had bought it for video editing...
 
I've completely outgrown and maxed out the ram on my 2.16Ghz 24" iMac. Since the apps I use aren't multi-threaded (Photoshop, Aperture, PhotoMechanic, and CaptureNX), I didn't need an 8-core. So I opted for the 2.66Ghz quad core, upgraded the ram to 12GB, added two additional 1TB drives, and a 26" display - for a little extra playing room.

...The CPU arrives tomorrow. :D
 
scoobs69 said:
I've completely outgrown and maxed out the ram on my 2.16Ghz 24" iMac. Since the apps I use aren't multi-threaded (Photoshop, Aperture, PhotoMechanic, and CaptureNX), I didn't need an 8-core. So I opted for the 2.66Ghz quad core, upgraded the ram to 12GB, added two additional 1TB drives, and a 26" display - for a little extra playing room.

...The CPU arrives tomorrow. :D
Click to expand...

How are you liking the Quad so far? For an all around machine?
 
My old MacBookPro was just too slow. It's over three years old, and I really don't travel much at all. So I decided to go for the big momma when they announced in March.

I've got to say that I am very happy. System builds that took 10 minutes on the old MBP now take about 2 minutes on the MP. I used to run mail, calendar, address book, safari, and the CS4 products while running a single Windows VM. Now I ususally run two VMs with XP and Server 2003 while still running the same apps. I dedicate processors and ram to the VMs and still have plenty of power to keep processing on the Mac side. I have yet to hit the wall with this setup.
 
Expandability: I hate external drives. I store a lot of media on my computer and require more than a single drive in an iMac or Mac Mini. Ability to upgrade components if needed. Others have already dropped in 3.33 GHz i7s into these!

Speed: Fastest Macs out there! Hackintoshes don't count.

Longevity: Before I bought my 09 Mac Pro I used a 2002 G4 Quicksilver. It still runs great but is getting a little too slow for what I want to do. The thing was flawless aside from some fans getting clogged up with pet hair... XD. I expect to get a good 7 years or more from this one as well.

Mac OS X: This is a given. For daily use this, just, works.
 
Got a used 2.66 quad (first gen) for the gf to do some graphic design work, DVD ripping and storage.

It's an investment and a damn good one.
 
DVB-S has allways been one of my main areas of interest with computers. I had an analog TV card in a 1995 Pentium I when it was possible. 2000 I went digital with a DVB-S card in a PIII and 2005 I upgraded to a dual processor Athlon system with 64-bit and XP-64 a year later. The system (Shuttle with heat pipe) was ridiculously loud but I kept it into the DVB-S2 era in 2007. Last year I got my first Mac (MBP) after a friend asked me to fix Bootcamp for her and it took me a week to find out what a Mac was. :D

In January I bought a broken G5 cheap to replace the Shuttle as a DVB-S2 system, movie play back and video streaming server. I was quickly disappointed with the 2,0 DP H.264 decoding capability and bought a 2005 2,3 GHz DC Power Mac. Again the machine was very nice but H.264 decoding and encoding was horrible. I heard that SL was going to fix this and my G5 would be left behind, so I sold it again and bought a Mac Pro. I was in love with the machine from day one and have slowly upgraded every aspect of the very slick tower. It is by far the most sexy computer I ever owned. I would desert it only if I could lay my hands on a pair of W5590s or W5580s. In that case I would definetely keep my disk system and just upgrade to the more future proof 1366 socket obviously to be able to run handbrake 24-threaded one day with ( multi ) GPU support. :D

There is no substitute to power but more power!!!
 
jjahshik32 said:
I know there have been many threads such as this but thought I'd start another one.

What are your reasons for buying a Mac Pro as to everything else (imac, mac mini, macbook pro, macbook air)?
Click to expand...

In mid 2006:

Purchase rationale:
#1) cost/performance and cost/feature ratio was very high - excellent even!
#2) bootcamp capability for when I needed full speed windoze - if OS X couldn't do the job.

Purpose:
#3) rendering 3D in Lightwave and Maya.
 
Video editing. The 2.16 iMac wasn't cutting it. Down to 1 mac pro. Will be getting another on the next revision. Oh, forgot.... POWER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:eek:
 
I use my Mac Pro for Music composing with Logic/Reason and music video's with Final Cut and After Effects (etc.). . I use my MBP on the road for the same things. I wanted a Mac Pro, cause I need POWER ;-)

Check www.seisendsix.com out, If you wanna listen to my music. :)
 
I have a Mac Pro because it was a direct replacement for my PowerMac G5. The reasons?

1) iMacs are great, and I could probably get by with one, but I prefer the speed. I'm now editing 5D Mark II files in Aperture, which slows my C2D 2.53Ghz MBP to a crawl, so I imagine an iMac wouldn't be much better. The Mac Pro copes fine.

2) Expandability without loads of messy externals

3) Better graphics
 
jjahshik32 said:
I know there have been many threads such as this but thought I'd start another one.

What are your reasons for buying a Mac Pro as to everything else (imac, mac mini, macbook pro, macbook air)?
Click to expand...

Performance and expandability. It's the only Mac that comes close to providing the versatility of a PC.
 
DoFoT9 said:
nice sounds! keep working on your skills to develop them even further.

the website needs a bit of tinkering, ;)

love the music though
Click to expand...

hey thanks for the compliment. :) I keep working on it. Yes the homepage isn't the modernest. I am trying to focus on other pages like youtube etc. to promote music cause I think such pages have become much more important. I see you're surely drummer, I bet you got a page or something too? = )

thanks again
 
seisend said:
hey thanks for the compliment. :) I keep working on it. Yes the homepage isn't the modernest. I am trying to focus on other pages like youtube etc. to promote music cause I think such pages have become much more important. I see you're surely drummer, I bet you got a page or something too? = )

thanks again
Click to expand...

fair enough point - your videos look very professional (given your equiptment and the crappy quality of the internet). i would still try my best to maintain the website effectively and efficiently as people will judge by everything they see, not just the music that you are playing (that the way i have experienced it anyway). your music is good, you need a solid website to back that up.

yup i play drums, i dont have a website or anything - i would love one or even a set of youtube vids, but i dont have the equipment to record it all how i would like. i have a youtube thingo (DoFoT9 is my username), with only 1 drumming video. its pathetic to say the least :p i need to put some "semi-pro" apps up.
 
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