Mac Pro Questions

[ghall]

I'm helping out the guy I intern with, on picking out a new setup. He's upgrading from a PowerMac G5 to a Mac Pro. He's trying to figure out how much RAM to get and what graphics card to get. He mainly works in Final Cut Pro, Motion, Adobe After Effects, and some 3D apps. Any advice?

 

[kingtj]

My 2 cents....

Go for the ATI 1900XT video. It'll do wonders for Apple Motion, as well as some of the other 3D apps. You definitely don't want the stock nVidia card for those programs! (I also don't believe the Quadro card is worth all the extra money, except in a couple limited circumstances. This is too much like the era of Windows PC CAD/CAM design people paying thousands for "CAD specific/certified" graphics cards, only to find out that a year later, some $300 "gamer" 3D card outperformed it anyway.)

As for RAM, I'd personally say to order the Mac Pro with 1GB and buy 4GB of additional RAM from Other World Computing (http://www.macsales.com). 5GB should be plenty of RAM for anything he's doing - and Other World Computing has very nice Mac Pro memory in stock that's considerably cheaper than Apple's own.

I'm helping out the guy I intern with, on picking out a new setup. He's upgrading from a PowerMac G5 to a Mac Pro. He's trying to figure out how much RAM to get and what graphics card to get. He mainly works in Final Cut Pro, Motion, Adobe After Effects, and some 3D apps. Any advice?

 

[ghall]

Thank you.