eMac (upgrade?) or buy new PC?

[sunset]

hiya guys, i was hoping to get some advice:

i've just sold a tape machine and i have a few grand burning a hole in my pocket.

currently i run an eMac (1.25ghz, 763MB ram) and i'm tossing up whether to do the hack "2gb" memory upgrade on it - or just bite the bullet and get one of those dual Athlon PCs and deck it out with all the mod cons?

...that is, as an alternative to A): getting a divorce and B): upgrading to dual/quad G5

i run PTLE 6.4 on 002r, and am planning on making use of BFD (deluxe), and a few compressor-kinda plugins - basically i'm trying to do as much as i can in-the-box, including fairly basic mixing. is my current system up to it?

any advice is appreciated - i'm finally ready to spend spend spend. apple has my head wanting the warm fuzzy feeling of an interface and a box i can rely on, but dammit man, those PCs are SO cheap now...but the crazy klingon-sounding no-name brandnames make me a bit hesitant

thanks in advance

[sunset]

hello? ('llo, 'llo, 'llo...)

anyone? ('one, 'one, 'one...)

[theblue1]

BFD is a pretty CPU/RAM hungry beast. (More the latter, even, than the former.)

With your existing RAM, I'm thinking it would be a very tight squeeze. (Of course, a RAM upgrade would take care of that aspect.) Another factor is disk speed, but if I recall the G4 eMacs are among Apple's better disk-performing systems (or however that adjective should work).


My own experience with BFD is this: I knew it was RAM and a bit disk intensive, so I made a point of upgrading my RAM from 1/2 to 1.25 GB [on a modest Pentium M Dell notebook, a 1.4 GHz, but with a 7200 rpm system drive, which I shopped hard to get -- roughly equivalent in CPU power to a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4, if that helps. I know it flew past a G4 800 MHz PB that came out about the same time. But I'm not real good at matching PC to Mac speeds anymore.]

My RAM didn't get here as soon as the program, so I ran it about a week at 512.

I was plannying on putting it on my system hard drive, since my outboard is a USB2 drive with only a 2 MB cache... but BFD is a big sucker, so I decided to try the USB2 drive. (MY FW port is taken up with a MOTU 828 mkII.)

To my enormous relief, it worked fine on that drive -- even after I moved my Sonar data files to it, as well. (I'd seen a reco to have DAW and BFD audio files on sep drives.)

My windows setup loads with a less-than 120 MB footprint, and with Sonar running usually rolls between 165-200+ (depending, of course, on what VIs, sample sets, etc, are loaded). With BFD, I was clocking close to and over my 512 MB (going into theretofore usually unplumbed nether reaches of, shudder, 'virtual memory,' ie, disk swapping). It mostly worked, though, but I wouldn't have wanted to load any big sample sets into, say, my Soundfont player. My 85+ MB custom GM set would have sent me far into overtime.)

I did try running BFD with 16 bit samples, instead, and it made a bit of difference -- but I could fairly easily tell the diff from the 24 bit samples [though the FXpansion folks allowed as how some folks might not]... I didn't expect that, really.

Anyhow, when I got the extra RAM, BFD became a bit more of a team player, rather than a RAM hogging primadonna. I notice the CPU hit -- but it ain't nothing like my convo reverb.


Still... between the relatively modest CPU demands of BFD, and the sometimes quite greedy demands of various plugs and VIs, I'm looking forward fairly soon to building a new desktop.

But there's one thing more important than power to me. Okay, two, if you count cost. And number one is quiet. I'm totally spoiled by my normally quite quiet notebook.

(But if I load up a prg that uses my Pentium M inefficiently like my photoeditor [Corel bought it so, of course, it turned to a bloated POS in just a couple versions] that nasty ol fan comes on (kicks into high, whatever) and all of a sudden I'm looking forward to an uncertain, but certainly quiet future. I don't care if I have to pour ice in it -- I'm not going to put up with loud fans ever again.)

[RadioMoo]

I have an eMac that I've been running Mbox on for three years. I'm waiting for the Intel Mac mini's to hit the market, then I'll get the Super Drive one. I'd never consider a PC because of the myriad issues involved in running PT on Windows.

HTH

[Henchman]

Originally Posted by RadioMoo

I'd never consider a PC because of the myriad issues involved in running PT on Windows.

HTH

What issues?

Seems that people are currently having more luck with PT7 than Mac users.
All I didm was unstall the sofwtare, plug-in the Ilok, Plug-in my M-Audio tranist, and everything worked right away.

Zero problems.

[ToddS]

You can get a really fast PC for less than a Mac, but you'd have to run Windows. I personally would wait and upgrade to a Mac, since that's what you have and are used to. Going to Windows from OSX sucks big time IMO.

[FFTT]

I would try to get by with your eMac a bit longer until the 64 bit dual core Intels
are available.

If you can't wait that long, then hang in there long enough for the universal binary
applications to catch up a bit and then consider an iMac Core Duo as a reasonably priced
transition machine.

[sunset]

hey, thanks for your thoughts folks! i really appreciate it.

i might even try the 2GB ram upgrade and hold off on the PC - it seems a weird time right now to be making any rash investments (then again is there ever a good time?).

cheers,

dave