MAC vs MAC

[SalimsWay]

Hey fellow producers,

I'm about to buy a MAC for my studio, and im wondering witch one of these is best to buy? ( copied from the seller's page ) :

Type	Mac Pro		Ram (GB)	16
Product/model	MA356*/A		Harddisk (GB)	500
Processor (GHz)	Two 2.66 GHz (5150) Dual-core Intel Xeon "Woodcres

OR:

Type	Mac Pro		Ram (GB)	12
Product/model	Mac Pro 1,1		Harddisk (GB)	4000
Processor (GHz)	Xeon Dual 2,66 4cores plus on the 2nd MAC the seller added that the mac contained: 1st UAD-2 Solo powered plugins card in the description. The first MAC is the chepeast. Thanks in advance

 

[hollandturbine]

You might be better off with a PC tower system depending on what you want to do, like the Mac's reputation is in part due to the fact that in big studios it is paired with Pro Tools DSP hardware that is designed to take the strain off the computer, which is quite different to running programs that exclusively rely on the native processing power of the host machine, such as Cubase which suffers in terms of performance under OSX......The current Mac Pro is also ridiculously old and the design of the upcoming Mac Pro is a joke.

 

[SalimsWay]

You might be better off with a PC tower system depending on what you want to do, like the Mac's reputation is in part due to the fact that in big studios it is paired with Pro Tools DSP hardware that is designed to take the strain off the computer, which is quite different to running programs that exclusively rely on the native processing power of the host machine, such as Cubase which suffers in terms of performance under OSX......The current Mac Pro is also ridiculously old and the design of the upcoming Mac Pro is a joke.

Thank you for replying
I've never tried mac, i've allways been producing on PC, but the guys im working on music with told me we had to go MAC, and insisted, so thats why im asking witch one of these is the best

 

[hollandturbine]

It looks to me like both of those Macs are the same model from 7 years ago, just with different RAM and hard drives.

 

[SalimsWay]

It looks to me like both of those Macs are the same model from 7 years ago, just with different RAM and hard drives.

But do you think i will be capable of making a beat and recording lots of vocals for the song with a few group channels and plugins in the same project without the computer lagging?, i mean 16 ram isn't that quite good?.

I just wanna be able to produce and record vocals without the computer freakin out,

Thanks in advance

 

[hollandturbine]

You might have issues if you intend to run more recent software on such an old machine, otherwise it should work just as well with old software as it did 7 years ago......ie don't overlook any issues in regard to 32 bit vs 64 bit or the age of the machine.

Macs are not some one size fits all super music computer and there is no benefit to getting sucked in by the halo effect.

 

[Salem Beats]

Hey fellow producers,

I'm about to buy a MAC for my studio, and im wondering witch one of these is best to buy? ( copied from the seller's page ) :

Type	Mac Pro		Ram (GB)	16
Product/model	MA356*/A		Harddisk (GB)	500
Processor (GHz)	Two 2.66 GHz (5150) Dual-core Intel Xeon "Woodcres

OR:

Type	Mac Pro		Ram (GB)	12
Product/model	Mac Pro 1,1		Harddisk (GB)	4000
Processor (GHz)	Xeon Dual 2,66 4cores plus on the 2nd MAC the seller added that the mac contained: 1st UAD-2 Solo powered plugins card in the description. The first MAC is the chepeast. Thanks in advance

It's impossible to tell you which of these is better. The details are too vague. The first one gives you a particular Xeon model. The second one does not.

With that said, dual/quad-core Xenons are pretty old. Modern Xeon processors are 8-core.

Just checked the Passmark score for the first Xeon system you posted. It scored 1,687. OUCH. (PassMark - Intel Xeon 5150 @ 2.66GHz - Price performance comparison)

For reference:
- My old Core 2 Duo laptop from 2008 scored 1,521. (PassMark - Intel Core2 Duo P8600 @ 2.40GHz - Price performance comparison)
- My current workstation with a Sandy-Bridge Extreme Core i7 3930k scores 12,086. (PassMark - Intel Core i7-3930K @ 3.20GHz - Price performance comparison)
- The current generation midrange $300 Haswell i7 4700K scores 10,135. (PassMark - Intel Core i7-4770K @ 3.50GHz - Price performance comparison)
- My girlfriend just bought a new Dell laptop for $300 and its processor scored about 1,800 on the benchmark.

A new $300 laptop from Walmart is quicker than the first system you presented.
Ugh.

-Ki
Salem Beats