Originally Posted By: Dignan
There's simply some Windows programs that I've used day in and day out for years now that I can't/don't want to give up. I'm sure there are Mac alternatives to some of them, but many of them have Windows alternatives that haven't swayed me.


Out of curiosity, what are they? I had a few apps I though were like that, till OS X versions grew on me.

Quote:
Still, my plan was exactly as you described, Tom. I'd use Parallels or Fusion to boot the Boot Camp installation, and just boot into Windows for gaming (I don't game much now but I might if I had a beast of a machine like this one).


If gaming is going to be something you do on the box, make sure to upgrade to the 8800 GT option ($150 more on the normal pricing). It's a noticeable step up from the default ATI 2600 card, and will help to keep the machine a viable gaming machine for how long it will also likely be a viable video editing box.

Quote:
I think I'd be happy with the longevity of the purchase for sure. I really don't care about overclocking but I thought I'd ask to be thorough. Thanks for all the help, and now I have to find the cash to drop on this bad boy.


I'm curious to see how long I stretch out the use of mine. I went with the 8 core config at 2.8, and threw in 4 more gigs of RAM on top of the 2 that it came with. I still have 4 RAM slots open, so thats not going to be a limit anytime soon. Down the road, I'm betting the video card will be bumped once at least, but that should be easy enough as the Mac Pro has the just recently released PCIe 2.0 slots in it. Processor wise, my hope is that apps continue to become more and more multicore optimized, so that they can just grow into the 8 procs I have rather then needing a faster one. This is the first true desktop I have had since the Pentium III days, so that alone is taking some time to get used to.

Already the jump above my MacBook Pro is noticeable. Handbrake DVD encodes ran at about 20-25 FPS on it with the machine maxed out. The Pro is running them at 130-140 FPS with the same settings, and has enough processor power left over to allow World of Warcraft to still run full speed.