More power than you'd be likely to need in the next 12 months I meant really.

Anyone who bought an Intel Q6600 or similar needs a damn good reason to switch to Core i7 unless those extra minutes save relate to cash returns. In fact the next 'upgrade' I do will be faster SSD disks and better graphics, the rest of the system, although some of it ageing in PC tech lifetimes if still powerful.

The system you could make for £1800 would be £3300 from Dell. If you didn't like the styling one of these doesn't cost much.

That said, we have about 8 graphic designers, 10 photo-touch-up artists and 5 photographers. Only the photographers get Apple kit, the graphic designers and the touch-up artists use Adobe CS suite under Windows XP... I do find it rather odd though. I was expecting the place to be swimming in Macs, when I first got here... For testing web sites, we have a single G3 tower with 128MB RAM, running Tiger! No wonder the rest are more than happy to stick with their dual core Windows machines.

That's a pretty important distinction. Personally, I only upgrade my processor and motherboard every 4 years on average. I add hard drives, but they're like CDs or Cake: consumable.



I'm still waiting for SSD to reach a point were I can afford one that blows my hard drives out of the box. I can't justify spending more than £100 or so. Maybe next year.

The denser platter disks are usually good upgrades, I went from 2 x 250gb Hitachis in Raid 0 with Raid 1 (via intel matrix) to one WD 640gb and the read/write speed of one disk vs Raid was similar with more space and less power requirements.

Absolutely. If you replace a 3 year old drive and reinstall Windows, most customer will think they have a whole new machine!

http://most-expensive.net/audio-cables

I say no more.

Are these high end or ridiculous?

Thought that was going to be a Russ Andrews link. He has made quite a lot of audio enthusiasts' blood boil over the years.

Just insane. No other word for it.

It's about the going rate, in the UK, for an 8-core machine of a fairly similar spec.

A Dell Precision T7500 configured as follows is £2039 ex VAT (£2345 incl VAT):

Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Nehalem processors
6GB memory
750GB hard drive
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
512MB Nvidia Quadro FX580

Whilst it's probably fair to say that any dual socket Workstation counts as high end, especially compared to what can be found in PCWorld, the Mac Pro isn't especially high end for a dual socket workstation. That Dell, for example, will take 3.2Ghz Nehalem Xeons, supports up to 192GB of RAM and 7.5TB of storage and can be supplied with a 4GB Quadro FX5800 graphics card and an Nvidia Tesla processing unit.

To put it into CC digestible terms, how much faster would that be on a relevant benchmark that properly tested all that power? I'm guessing about 100x faster, but that's just a guess. Could be 1000x for all I know because it's off my scale!

You're not "top cat" if the cat from Dell is 100x faster.

It would be interesting to show a graph of performance in total combined processing unit MIPS (or something more suitable?) for various retail computers. I suspect the Tesla loaded Dell would be on the right, and then a very big gap. On that graph, every computer anyone here owns would be "low end".

Well nobody said that Apple is top cat. There can indeed be only one.



However I still stand by my definition of the Mac Pro as "high end" even if there are a few machines that beat it on price and performance.

Apple don't make extreme machines but most of them are pretty good even if they come at a pretty price sometimes.


CC

p.s. 100 times faster seriously?

I think most people would totally agree with you on that level. I know I do.

Any brand new Mac is better than more than half the machines in PC World. They simply don't make cheap consumer tat, which is what >60% of people buy.

However, if I was wealthy enough not to care about "value for money" and I was choosing a laptop then I'd probably buy a Sony or three. They're generally better quality and they do a much wider range. The only thing that would make me consider a Mac is the unibody. Although, if I was that rich I'd probably buy one anyway just to get the feel of OSX.

If I was rich and buying a desktop, then I'd probably commission Jon to build me something. I'm pretty sure he could give me a spectacular machine for £2500.



That's concervative. Read the link he posted!

http://www.nvidia.com/object/personal_s ... uting.html

No.

You posted that while I was editing my post in responce to CC's edit.

Yes.

960 parallel cores are faster than 8. A lot faster.