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!
I’d probably go with two smaller drives to separate the OS from the Swap file but other than that
Only 4GB? 
and I can’t wait to see the benchmarks 
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.
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.
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.
Since you seem to feel like arguing :lol:
No raptor option over at apple, but a 250 GB +500 GB HDD’s are only $30 more than a single 750 GB HDD
:lol: 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 8)
Tomatoes, Tomaatoes… 
lets just call the whole thing off :lol:
dang! now that i was starting to enjoy it :lol:
Lele
no one makes me break into chorus!!!
Re: New Purchase… opinions needed… or throw tomatoes…
OMG only 4gb
8x cores and there must be 8gb
Sure, you will find it usefull!
yes but first you need to talk him out of installing XP 32bit
I’m open to all this advise and am changing plans accordingly.
And I VERY MUCH APPRECIATE all the input so far!!!
I run a 32bit 3dsMax plugin that’s critical to my work.
Would this prevent me from going to 64 bit?
As far as I know you’ll have to leave OSX on the machine and boot using Bootcamp… I don’t think you can just install Windows on it, with the BIOS/EFI incompatibility. At the very least, you’ll have to do some creative hacking to get it to work. There’s a slew of drivers it installs to allow Windows to work with their motherboards.
That said, if you have to run Windows under Bootcamp, I’m not 100% sure you’ll still be able to use a non-Apple graphics card.
If it’s just to render with, why bother upgrading the video card anyway? Or, just buy 5 small Core 2 Duo machines?
its nice to see the macpro gaining popularity. you’re going to love it. i cant wait to see some benchmarks. if you don’t mind, pm me if/when you get around to rendering the benchmark scene.
-joe
I have the ATI in mine, and im really impressed how fast max is using DX with it.
Will do! - Though it looks like I’ll be stuck in 32bit more for a while till the anti-piracy garbage on a plugin I use is updated to 64bit. 