Help With Choosing A Mac Pro

[calum-gracie]

Hi all , this is my first post here!

long story short im looking to upgrade from my Macbook pro to a Mac Pro.

The new mac pro will be the center of my home recording studio. I will be using the likes of Pro Tools 10 , Logic Pro , Final Cut Pro x , Motion etc. At the moment I can run all the programs on my macbook pro ( 2011 2.3GHZ i5 ) but iv noticed its started to get a bit sluggish running large pro tools sessions , which was never a problem before!

Im looking to go second hand as I dont have the budget for a new Mac Pro.

I have found 2 that im interested in and was wondering if anyone could help me pick which one is best for my needs.

Mac 1 £594

The Mac Pro "Quad Core" 2.0 is powered by two 2.0 GHz dual core Intel Xeon 5150 processors with 4 MB of shared level 2 cache per processor, a 128-bit SSE3 vector engine, and 1.33 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses. It is configured with 4 GB of 667 MHz DDR2 ECC "fully-buffered" FB-DIMM memory, a 250 GB (7200 RPM) 3 Gb/s Serial ATA hard drive, a double-layer 16X "SuperDrive", and a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card with 256 MB of GDDR2 SDRAM, one dual-link DVI port and one single-link DVI port.


Mac 2 £900

This Mac Pro Quad Core" 2.8 (Early 2008) is powered by a 2.8 GHz Quad Core Intel (Harpertown/Penryn) Xeon processor with 12 MB of level 2 cache, a 128-bit SSE4 SIMD vector engine, and 1.6 GHz "64-bit dual independent frontside buses. The unit is configured with 2GB of RAM, a 320Gb Hard Drive, a double-layer 16X "SuperDrive", and an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics processor with 256 MB of GDDR3 memory and two dual-link DVI ports.

I will be upgrading the RAM and Hardrives on both of them , what i want to know now is what the major difference between the processors is?

Thanks

Calum

Calum Gracie Online Mixing and Mastering - HOME

 

[harryb2448]

G'day and welcome to the forums.

Suggest giving the first no thought. It is a Dual Core 2006 model and will not run operating system later than Lion OS X.7. This is because whilst it is a 64bit architecture, it has a 32bit EFI so will not run 64bit operating systems.

With the second, upgrade to at least 16GB of memory from OWC or Crucial for best music recording results. The gfx card may be upgraded later to say an ATI Radeon 5770 at least. This machine will run Mountain lion and is worth twice as much as the 2FGHz model. Your post says 'processor'. Is this one of the single processor models? A dual processors will be much better.

Download a little application called MacTracker which will help with Geekbench speed tests etc. The 2GHz machine has a rated bench test of 3714, whilst a 2.8 dual processor comes in at 7685. A single 2.8GHz comes in the middle with 5317.

 

[calum-gracie]

Thanks for the reply!

from what I can see its a single processor model.

thanks for all the information , very helpful indeed!

Iv downloaded the App as well which is a great little app!

Thanks again

Calum

 

[harryb2448]

My pleasure Calum and for what it id worth hang out for a dual processor model. The single can be upgraded but it is a bit pricey and complicated.