New Purchase... opinions needed... or throw tomatoes...

[JeffG2]

Hey - I'm about to buy a MacPro to render on speced out as follows...

MacPro

Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon

4GB Ram (4 x 1GB)

750GB Drive 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s

(Stock) NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB (single-link DVI/dual-link DVI)

Will be adding either a NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 256MB or a NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 256MB - to run under Windows only.

Installing Win XP pro 32bit

Price $5,000 (plus the cost of an additional video card)

Any opinions or advise???

Thanks for any input!

[RErender]

I'd probably go with two smaller drives to separate the OS from the Swap file but other than that

Only 4GB? :P

and I can't wait to see the benchmarks

[DaForce]

Why are you installing 32bit windows... 64bit is the best idea. Especially if you actually want to use all of your 4gb of ram.

I wouldnt necessarily both with the quadro cards way overpriced. A game card will be 90% as good IMO and 1/3 of the price if not cheaper.

Multiple HDD's maybe.. but the performance increase of having a seperate HDD for OS and swap is basically negligable now days given the speed of current drives.

If you can get a raptor for your boot drive that would be a better solution. As they are really quick.

[RErender]

With two drives you can read and write at the same time but yeah probably negligible

I missed the 32 bit part, 4GB is more than enough then.

[DaForce]

Yeah im well aware of the technical advantages but really, its not worth the cost just for that one thing. I have tried both ways and couldnt really notice a difference. Just set your pagefile min and max sizes to be the same.
However having a faster boot driver 10,000rpm raptor and a seperate storage drive is a good idea.
Makes windows reinstalls so much easier.

[RErender]

Since you seem to feel like arguing

No raptor option over at apple, but a 250 GB +500 GB HDD's are only $30 more than a single 750 GB HDD :P

[DaForce]

not arguing.. just conversing

Well the secret would be to buy the raptor eslewhere
Get a few hunderd gig drive from apple. Buy a 150gb raptor install it and away you go.

Failing that.. then yeah.. 2 drives of some descript from Apple

[RErender]

not arguing.. just conversing

Tomatoes, Tomaatoes...

[DaForce]

lets just call the whole thing off

[studioDIM]

dang! now that i was starting to enjoy it

Lele

[DaForce]

no one makes me break into chorus!!!

[RErender]

Re: New Purchase... opinions needed... or throw tomatoes...

Thanks for any input!

[Paul Oblomov]

OMG only 4gb
8x cores and there must be 8gb

Sure, you will find it usefull!

[RErender]

yes but first you need to talk him out of installing XP 32bit

[JeffG2]

I'm open to all this advise and am changing plans accordingly.

And I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE all the input so far!!!