Old vs new Macs dillema

fumanchu · Post by **fumanchu** » Thu May 18, 2006 10:03 pm

Dear friends,

Finally I found some dough $$$ for a new machine. And initially I thought to buy a MacBook Pro but then I though well I don’t perform on stage so the question became maybe I should get a Quad tower which would run all of my programs immediately complete NI, Hypno and Live etc or perhaps I should wait till NI and Macintosh releases a tower on Intel. So the question is desktop or laptop – if stage is not important. Till now I was running XP and dual Athlon but now with NI and core more power would be essential. How much difference it makes to put 4 or 8 GB into a Mac. Are there any PC which can accept more then 4 GB of memory. Thank you for a any thoughts on this matters. Keep Living! fumanchu

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Thu May 18, 2006 10:38 pm

If you are running a dual Athlon rig you won't see much performance increase at all by going the Macbook way (or any other PC type hardware) unless you have a very old Athlon. Athlons are about as fast you can get for floating point processing.

A quad G5 will probably be slower for Live.

Don't buy into the marketing hype.

Machinate · Post by **Machinate** » Thu May 18, 2006 11:17 pm

Wait a little bit,

then get a refurbished quad tower for next to nothing,

and giggle with excitement as it is quadrupled in power with multi-processor support in Live6...

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Fri May 19, 2006 8:55 am

But a dual Athlon will also benefit from Live 6. So it will be perhaps twice as fast.

fumanchu · Post by **fumanchu** » Fri May 19, 2006 12:37 pm

Here are specs of my machine Athlon 64 2x 3800+ 1.99 GHz and 2 GB of ram. fumanchu

Michael-SW · Post by **Michael-SW** » Fri May 19, 2006 8:12 pm

fumanchu wrote:Here are specs of my machine Athlon 64 2x 3800+ 1.99 GHz and 2 GB of ram. fumanchu

It will be very hard to find a faster audio workstation than that. I doubt a new Intel (Mac OR PC) will be faster. Do the Live 5 performance test (search the General forum for that) to see for yourself.