After waiting as long as I could, hoping for the 8way, i broke down and did it. My PC exploded AGAIN last Saturday. I came home from my brother's house and it was on a locked BSOD and after reboot, the disks were hosed and wouldnt boot.
I am a very competent user. I work for eBay as a Snr SysAdmin. I've been there for ~ 5 years and am part of a very senior team responsible for keeping over 8000 servers running smoothly. I've had the privilege of working from home for the last two years after moving to Arizona from San Jose. We opened a new datacenter in AZ, and a few senior employees were given the option to move to AZ in case we needed to go on site for any urgent issues. I spend over 12 hours a day in front of my computer, so I don't mind spending good money on it. I have a very good knowledge of every MS OS, Solaris, Linux, & FreeBSD (personal fav). I'm not a PC or Mac bigot; I simply use what works well, and currently this is OS X. There is nothing special about the new Intel Mac HW, as its standard PC stuff. The packaging is nicer! I state this so that everyone knows that my opinions are very neutral and unbiased in either direction.
I've been enjoying my MacBookPro all year without any issues. I only play WoW, and i'm getting 80+fps on the MacPro with all settings on high @ 1920x1200.
I do heavy Final Cut editing, and my laptop was choking on all my h.264 renders. I run parallels for any remaining windows apps i need,
and x11 to run all my favorite x11 apps.
3Ghz Quad Xeon, 6GB Ram, 500GB OS disk, 1.5TB Scratch FCP Disk Raid0
ATI X1900XT 512MB on two 24" 2405FPW's, 7300GT on two 20" 2007FP's
Firewave Firewire soundcard for 5.1 audio thru creative gigaworks. The FireWave product is really nice. It has one bug where it doesnt remember your settings after reboot, but I can live with that since I never reboot. I get fully functional 5.1 in WoW. I ripped my DVD collections into DivX+AC3.avi's and they play back in VLC in full 5.1. DVD's play back perfectly too obviously in 5.1. I can author music tracks in SoundTrack in 5.1, too bad I don't have FCP Compressor to generate .ac3 streams tho.
I can confirm that you can put an ATI X1900XT (slot 1) and the nv7300GT (slot 4) and get fully functional 3D on all 4 screens. The ATI runs with 16 lanes and the 7300 with 8 lanes. WoW runs perfect on the ATI screens, and slows down as expected on the 7300GT screens.
I hope the 8-way does not come out before 2007. I had to spend this money for tax reasons during fiscal '06, and hope I won't regret it in a few weeks!
Buy my old PC: http://www.f20c.com/v/ozy/album19/gamingrig/
AMD X2 4800+ OC'd to 2.65Ghz, 2GB Ram, 7800GTX SLI 500GB Raid 0, Watercooled to the max!
I am a very competent user. I work for eBay as a Snr SysAdmin. I've been there for ~ 5 years and am part of a very senior team responsible for keeping over 8000 servers running smoothly. I've had the privilege of working from home for the last two years after moving to Arizona from San Jose. We opened a new datacenter in AZ, and a few senior employees were given the option to move to AZ in case we needed to go on site for any urgent issues. I spend over 12 hours a day in front of my computer, so I don't mind spending good money on it. I have a very good knowledge of every MS OS, Solaris, Linux, & FreeBSD (personal fav). I'm not a PC or Mac bigot; I simply use what works well, and currently this is OS X. There is nothing special about the new Intel Mac HW, as its standard PC stuff. The packaging is nicer! I state this so that everyone knows that my opinions are very neutral and unbiased in either direction.
I've been enjoying my MacBookPro all year without any issues. I only play WoW, and i'm getting 80+fps on the MacPro with all settings on high @ 1920x1200.
I do heavy Final Cut editing, and my laptop was choking on all my h.264 renders. I run parallels for any remaining windows apps i need,
and x11 to run all my favorite x11 apps.
3Ghz Quad Xeon, 6GB Ram, 500GB OS disk, 1.5TB Scratch FCP Disk Raid0
ATI X1900XT 512MB on two 24" 2405FPW's, 7300GT on two 20" 2007FP's
Firewave Firewire soundcard for 5.1 audio thru creative gigaworks. The FireWave product is really nice. It has one bug where it doesnt remember your settings after reboot, but I can live with that since I never reboot. I get fully functional 5.1 in WoW. I ripped my DVD collections into DivX+AC3.avi's and they play back in VLC in full 5.1. DVD's play back perfectly too obviously in 5.1. I can author music tracks in SoundTrack in 5.1, too bad I don't have FCP Compressor to generate .ac3 streams tho.
I can confirm that you can put an ATI X1900XT (slot 1) and the nv7300GT (slot 4) and get fully functional 3D on all 4 screens. The ATI runs with 16 lanes and the 7300 with 8 lanes. WoW runs perfect on the ATI screens, and slows down as expected on the 7300GT screens.
I hope the 8-way does not come out before 2007. I had to spend this money for tax reasons during fiscal '06, and hope I won't regret it in a few weeks!
Buy my old PC: http://www.f20c.com/v/ozy/album19/gamingrig/
AMD X2 4800+ OC'd to 2.65Ghz, 2GB Ram, 7800GTX SLI 500GB Raid 0, Watercooled to the max!
