Mac 8-core worth it !?

Nuendo
#1

Hi all,

Happy New Year to you all !

It’s been awhile since I dropped by and lots of stuff has happened, apparently, new strange forum and all. Well. PT9 going native, LASS vs. Hollywood Strings, still no Quicktime 64bit for Windows… the World still turning… I hope all of you great folks from the old forums still hang around. I’ve learned so much from you.

Now. I’ve been with Wintel since '96 and it just stroke me the other day how much time I’ve spent inside the box, toiling with hardware, BSOD’s, reformats, endless Win reinstalls. Meanwhile, my old Blackbook just keeps running, no problems, not one reinstall in 5 years, the thing’s simply so stable !

Just how well does a Mac Pro 8-core work !? do you experience noteworthy trouble with drivers that kill the system, reboots, stuff !?

Guess I finally got enough of the Windows thing… please let me know your experience with The Other Side !

Thanks
Halfdan

#2

I work on both sides.

Go for the 6 core 3,3 Ghz. It’s a superb system for audio!

#3

Ahhhhh.

‘Hasslefree’

An additional question : RAM seems to cost quite a lot at the Mac online store. Is that because the box needs some exotic RAM, or is it just Apple overcharging !?


best,
Halfdan

#4

Just overcharging.

Cheers

#5

Don’t buy RAM from Apple. Crucial or one of the other 3rd party guys.

I’m still very happy with my 2008 8-core MacPro. Very reliable and powerful enough for my studio’s needs. RME PCIe hardware is excellent and allows very low (by Mac standards at least) latency when needed.

#6

My 2007 Mac Pro is probably the oldest and slowest (2.0x4) but I regularly mix upwards of 100 tracks of 48K/24bit audio without problem. I don’t work with video however, so that would be a a factor in your choice. I think you will enjoy running a Mac in any case!

#7

Thanks for your info !

went to the Apple store.

Mac Pro 6-core, 3 Gb RAM: 3.900 €

a similar PC based on a combo of Asus and Intel, 12 Gb RAM : 2.200 €

I really don’t see any reason a Mac should be this expensive, built from the same components than the PC.

Hackintosh, maybe !?

best,
Halfdan

#8

I used to run macs, 100%. Back when that is just what everyone did. I switched about 5 years ago to PC.

This month, I’m picking up a custom multi core 24gb Ram 64bit mix machine with ridiculous processing power for $1300 that will likely last me 2-3 years. I can’t even imagine what Apple would charge me for that kind of power.

I’m never going back

#9

I hade following experiences: Nuendo 4 on iMac 2 Gb 2.2 GHZ DualCore with stucking project which made me tired.Permanently it just had unexpected quiting…so I run this project on Nuendo 5 on the same machine but under MacOSX. Problems was gone. May be that is because of N4 and N5 but I guess not only this. Similar situation: my friends had the same problem on their studio. When they tired of Windows XP on PC and did’t want to experiment with Win7 64 they move to MacOsX on MacPro. Now they feel much better :slight_smile: .

#10

Performance on OSX is still worse with small buffer-size than on Windows (had to ask Pål about that, as I am not working on a Macs for a while :slight_smile: ). But disc copying is faster and Quicktime on OSX can play back almost everything. So if you need to work with a lot of plugins with small buffer-size, you have to work on Windows. If you need wider video formats support - go to OSX. Stability under Windows is not issue (I mean, not more then under OSX).