Making The Full On Leap To Mac – The MacPro!

Well, I just ruined my Christmas and birthday for the next two years!  I had to agree that I wouldn’t buy another computer until after 2010 to get it, but I finally broke down and bought a new MacPro – and holy cow does it rock!

I bought the base  (if you can call an eight Xeon system base) entry-level 8-way MacPro – upgrading to better CPUs, etc. just didnt’ seem worth the expense.

However, I went ahead and purchased a few extras to configure this machine as a truly “one stop shop” for all my music production needs – I’ll discuss my final configuration in a bit.

Out of the box, this thing looks and performs awesome!  I did a couple of tests with it, one a DVD to H264 conversion, the other a Logic project performance test.  Both were somewhat subjective, but here’s what I found:

• The DVD conversion process was about 10x faster than on my MacBook (my MacBook is a Core Duo, not Core 2 – but 10x is pretty amazing) – took about 12 minutes!
• The music test was much more subjective – however, anyone that’s done any Logic’ing on an older MacBook probably gets this.  On my MacBook, I had a 24 track project with a few plug-ins, using an Apogee Duet, A Powercore Firewire, and a Focusrite LiquidMix.  Sometimes, starting up a project I would get system overload errors, disk speed errors, etc. and couldn’t get it to play.  Usually, playing it over and over it would eventually cache (I think) enough info that I could mix the session.  With the MacPro?  Let’s just say that even running most of my audio data off a USB2.0 drive (leaving the Firewire bus for audio I/O and the Powercore and LiquidMix), I was able to launch my test project flawlessly, it never burped at all and the CPU monitors (yes, all EIGHT of them) didn’t even register that anything was going on!

My current config is that I have a 320Gb OS drive, and all my music files are stored on two external USB2.0 drives – one for my project files, and one for audio files and virtual instruments.  I found that even on the MacPro, it’s better not to do disk I/O on the same bus as audio I/O – I always seem to get noise of some kind at some point.  Separating out the disk I/O from the audio I/O and plug-in processing seems to fix any problems.  I am runnin 2Gb of memory.

However, here’s how it will look soon:

• - (8) 2.8Ghz Xeon CPU
• 10Gb memory
• 320Gb system / OS drive
• 1.5TB project drive
• 1.5TB virtual instrument / sample drive

The drives are all 3GB/s SATA drives hosted right in the computer – NewEgg had a screaming deal on 1.5TB Seagates ($189!) that I couldn’t pass up.  Now, I won’t need to use ANY USB2.0 while doing music production.  I will use my existing external drives as backup drives for the internal drives – so nothing’s wasted.  I don’t need RAID – it’s probably overkill – but at some point if I needed even more performance I would trick it out with a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) option – but I doubt I will need to.  This still leaves me with an empty internal bay as well.

Can’t wait to get it all configured this way, I expect I will be able to run virtually unlimited tracks / plug-ins, etc.  Plus, if I run out of CPU room, I can always use my MacBook as a LogicNode!