Mac Pro questions

[IPLayHamers]

What's the most powerful Mac Pro I can buy to use with Logic 8? I wil be adding UAD-2 cards as well and I'm curious as to how much Ram I need to have fast, reliable service. The Mac Pro can be blown out to 32 Gb Ram. Do I need that much?

Thanks

[Versatile255]

check the apple website see how much u can add or do a search as far as the ram no u dont need 32gb ram but do u want it thats up to you and how much plugins and tracks ull be using etc.if u do a search ull see loads of people with 8gb,16 etc.

[timmcallister]

You said nothing about price/performance ratio, so i guess money is no object. Here goes...

the base model of the Mac Pro (8 core 2.8) will likely give you all the CPU power you need for some time. But go ahead and buy the 3.2 if you have the bucks.

RAM - you'll get slightly better memory performance if you fill all 8 slots with the same memory. 8 slots x 2GB will give you 16GB total at max memory performance. 8 slots x 4GB will give you max performance AND max memory. I added 4 x 2GB to my Mac Pro (which came with 2 x 1GB) for a total of 10GB. Thats seems about right for my uses (I can run Live AND logic AND safari AND a virtual machine and still have a little free memory left over for).

Hard drives - If you want FAST the hard drives will probably be your biggest bottleneck. Buy a velociraptor for your boot drive, a 256GB SSD for samples (you don't need to worry about writes on a sample drive), and add a few 1TB+ drives in the other two bays.

Wish I had your money...

Good luck!

[EveningSky]

Hi IPPlayHammers,

I urge you to check a study published at Other World Computing, a commercial company which specializes in Mac enhancement products.

I have been a regular customer of theirs over many years of Mac ownership, and have been consistently happy with their customer service and products. They know Mac Products.

I derive no $ from this company BTW. But now to leave this issue,
this company did a nice study with both Promacs (4 and 8 microprocessor cores), testing their performance with a suite of performance challenging software, and found some interesting results.

As was previously said by Versatile, it appears to be more important to fill out all of the memory slots, for the 8 core version, at lease with current OS and the software challenge they used.

I cannot tell you if this test is valid for all software.
I cannot tell you if this test is valid for all future versions of the OSX.

It does appear however, that you would get a better performance enhancement by filling up all 8 memory slots with 1GB RAM each, than only partially filling up the slots with higher capacity RAM modules.

For that reason, I personally, will give consideration to filling up my computer with 8 x 1GB RAM modules, when the price falls a little more, (rather than put in 6 x 2GB).

I am waiting for the prices to fall a little more, and will then decide.

It is not entirely clear to me how much performance boost I would get by purchasing the 2GB modules, however if the price is close to the 1gB modules, I will probably pruchase them, with the hope, that somehow, someday, they will give me better performance.

Good luck.

Yours, ES

[Igotsoul4u]

+1 for OWC. I started using them after I saw that Pat Metheny and his crew only owned drives from OWC. They are cutting edge so I figured they would know. Been using OWC for 6 years now with not a hiccup from any of their products. Costumer support is incredible also.

[Firechild]

But hurry to buy one very soon !
The current models will soon to be replaced, so please hurry