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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

You must choose a Mac immediately

@ offhollywood: Interesting tidbits there, Mark... And you're even specifying a date? Hmmmm... Oh, and Adobe on the Mac...? Really? 'Cuz CS3 on the Mac is a dog compared to CS3 on Vista 64. :shiftyph34r:

Gregory Leno said:
If you really need an interim computer I actually think the highest end iMac with 4 gig of ram is a pretty good solution. It gives you more horsepower and graphics for the buck than the laptops, and yet still can be somewhat portable. The only down side is that there is no eSata ability.
Click to expand...

Just looking at the numbers, I would agree, but... Most of the horsepower under the hood of these current Mac towers goes unused. It's a software issue and with the upcoming Nehalem CPUs, Intel has really been beating their drum , telling developers to get serious about multiprocessor computing. The race for more cores is the new MHz race and right now, the software is lagging behind on a massive scale.

Oh, and what do you mean there is no eSATA ability? I have eSATA HBAs in all my Macs. You can also pipe the two ODD SATA ports on a Mac Pro out the rear and use them as eSATA. Although, the OS doesn't like to recognize them as external in most situations, due to how they're defined in the EFI entries.

Anyway, I still stand by my laptop suggestion. But if you can hold out to the end of september, then it may be worth it. I would just hope that Mark is right. I'd hate to wait a month and then find out this new wonderful thing is delayed or something. When it all comes down to it, if you need it you will have to buy it and sometimes you just can't wait.
 
Build yourself a Hackintosh for about 600 bucks that will blow the doors off an existing tower
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Just looking at the numbers, I would agree, but... Most of the horsepower under the hood of these current Mac towers goes unused. It's a software issue and with the upcoming Nehalem CPUs, Intel has really been beating their drum , telling developers to get serious about multiprocessor computing. The race for more cores is the new MHz race and right now, the software is lagging behind on a massive scale.

Oh, and what do you mean there is no eSATA ability? I have eSATA HBAs in all my Macs. You can also pipe the two ODD SATA ports on a Mac Pro out the rear and use them as eSATA. Although, the OS doesn't like to recognize them as external in most situations, due to how they're defined in the EFI entries.
Click to expand...

Uhh. I think you misread my post... I was comparing the iMac to a Laptop, not a tower. And I was saying that there is no eSata ability on an iMac. If you've got eSata out of an iMac let me know how your doing it.

Look, obviously a Tower is the way to go if your serious about processing these files and a laptop for the field is more desirable. But if Apple is coming out with new machines in a month and you need something right now, I still believe the High end iMac is a very cost effective INTERIM solution. I wasn't suggesting the iMac is the best way to go in the long run.


Greg
 
Gregory Leno said:
Uhh. I think you misread my post... I was comparing the iMac to a Laptop, not a tower. And I was saying that there is no eSata ability on an iMac. If you've got eSata out of an iMac let me know how your doing it.
Click to expand...

Ooops. Yeah, I thought you meant a tower for some reason. Actually, I do know of a hack to get eSATA on the 24" iMac. It holds two HDDs, you simply pipe the secondary SATA interface out of the system. Unfortunately, the EFI and OSX system don't have complete entries to treat this as an external port, so it's missing some features that may be desirable.

As for the iMac it's an OK solution, but I think I would still choose the laptop. Neither one is that powerful in the grand scheme of things. The laptop is more portable and ironically is more expandable.

The two missing features that keep me from buying an iMac are:

1. No expansion slot -- either PCIe or ExpressCard would do.

2. No DVI input. The iMac is just screaming to serve as dual functionality computer and display. How handy would it be to have an iMac as a secondary display on a workstation and it be its own system when needed.

OK, #2 isn't a deal breaker. It just seems like one of those totally obvious features where there is no logical explanation for why it doesn't exist.

While I'm bitching about such things, I also want to voice my opinion of the new Apple wireless keyboard. WTF? Did they really have to eliminate the number pad? That's OK, I use Logitech anyway because Apple has yet to make a decent mouse... The nifty scroll-ball on the Mighty Mouse is great, but hardly cool enough to overcome all the other issues.

sorry, rant over...
 
snowmotion said:
Build yourself a Hackintosh for about 600 bucks that will blow the doors off an existing tower
Click to expand...

Er.... I doubt you could do it for $600.

You'll pay $1200 for just one 3.2GHz Xeon CPU... If you want a performance Mac, your best bet is to buy a Mac. Actually buy a used one since there's lots of them out there and then retro-fit it with a liquid cooling system and overclock it to 4.2~4.4GHz. :ninja:
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Actually, I do know of a hack to get eSATA on the 24" iMac. It holds two HDDs, you simply pipe the secondary SATA interface out of the system. Unfortunately, the EFI and OSX system don't have complete entries to treat this as an external port, so it's missing some features that may be desirable.
Click to expand...

Interesting...


Jeff Kilgroe said:
2. No DVI input. The iMac is just screaming to serve as dual functionality computer and display. How handy would it be to have an iMac as a secondary display on a workstation and it be its own system when needed.

OK, #2 isn't a deal breaker. It just seems like one of those totally obvious features where there is no logical explanation for why it doesn't exist.

...
Click to expand...

Yeah, wouldn't that be nice.

Hopefully the next release of the Macs will make us all happy.

Greg
 
I recently posted about this over on ScarletUser. What about a 24" iMac? As a stopgap measure, you can't really go wrong with it. They're fairly portable, if you get the right carrying case, and have much better specs than the top of the line Macbook Pro, plus a much bigger screen, for about $1000 cheaper (check out the attachment below.)

Obviously it's not as portable as a MBP, but it's not impossible by any stretch. This case makes it possible:

http://www.ilugger.com/24-inch-imac-case.cfm

There's also a hard case here:

http://www.casesbypelican.com/comput...le-imac-24.htm

Either way, an iMac is significantly better than a MBP, if you can live with it's size. The lack of eSATA shouldn't matter much, especially if you're considering getting a Mac Pro later on. You can work using the 2K proxies in FCP on the iMac with a FW800 drive no problem.
 
snowmotion said:
Build yourself a Hackintosh for about 600 bucks that will blow the doors off an existing tower
Click to expand...

Let me get this straight, because I just want to make sure I read this right. Your advice is that he should work with his potentially invaluable footage on an unofficial, unsupported, kludge of a workstation?

Brilliant.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
@ offhollywood: Interesting tidbits there, Mark... And you're even specifying a date? Hmmmm... Oh, and Adobe on the Mac...? Really? 'Cuz CS3 on the Mac is a dog compared to CS3 on Vista 64. :shiftyph34r:
Click to expand...

Jeff -

Get ready for CS4.

Get ready for a screaming touchscreen mac under $1K.

Get ready for 10bit - HDMI out off the GPU.

You can have your Vista.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Er.... I doubt you could do it for $600.

You'll pay $1200 for just one 3.2GHz Xeon CPU... If you want a performance Mac, your best bet is to buy a Mac. Actually buy a used one since there's lots of them out there and then retro-fit it with a liquid cooling system and overclock it to 4.2~4.4GHz. :ninja:
Click to expand...

Jeff... Do you know of a good Liquid Cooling System you can recomend?
 
Offhollywood said:
Jeff -

Get ready for CS4.

Get ready for a screaming touchscreen mac under $1K.

Get ready for 10bit - HDMI out off the GPU.

You can have your Vista.
Click to expand...

Now you got me excited. :) Hopefully CS4 brings 64bit to the table for OSX as well. Personally, I'd love to dump Windows all together and just live on my Macs, but ain't going to happen anytime soon.
 
cinepost35 said:
Jeff... Do you know of a good Liquid Cooling System you can recomend?
Click to expand...

Not really. I haven't found one that doesn't leave something to be desired, but I've used a few that all get the job done. A friend of mine has a Mac Pro overclocked to over 4GHz. I believed he used the Thermaltake cooling system, don't recall which one for sure. He says it works pretty good, but the external unit has a small leak. I know it took some work to adapt it to the Mac Pro. I have a liquid cooled PC that's using a Zalman Reserator system. Works good. Their idea of silent and mine are apparently two different things though.
 
Offhollywood said:
Jeff -

Get ready for CS4.

Get ready for a screaming touchscreen mac under $1K.

Get ready for 10bit - HDMI out off the GPU.

You can have your Vista.
Click to expand...

Whoa! Can't wait.
 
Dude!

Your WANG can't touch (hee hee) my Mattel Aquarius or Adam Colecovision! Heck I'll even throw my VIC 20 at it! Not to mention my LASER 128 with expansion port box! With my tape drive I can listen to music and load BASIC.

... and I could go on and on.. so I won't.

I would definitely wait like Offhollywood is saying. Can't wait for them to update towers later this year.

Need more 16x and/or 8x PCIe ports. MOREEEEE.

ATF
 
Need more 16x and/or 8x PCIe ports.
Click to expand...

Apple should really think about installing more PCIe ports on their tower.
Implementing the memory bandwidth;
And maybe also using DDR3 Memory.

But they are all concentrated on making laptops and Ipods... for consumer market.
I'm sure this is the right commercial choice but sometime i feel a bit frustrated when I need something I can't have because I'm on a Mac
 
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