Without a doubt the older silver towers are a much more cost-effective solution. I got into the cylinder because:
- I had filled up all of the internal drive bays and PCIe slots on my 12-core 2.93 tower. MOTU card and 2x Sonnet Tempo Pro cards gave me eight internal drive bays, and the only way to go further was either FireWire (dead technology and not really that fast) or eSATA cards and drives (not ideal either). With the BlackMagic MultiDocks on Thunderbolt I can just keep adding more docks as needed. With the six Thunderbolt ports on the cylinder, each pair of ports represents one of the three "busses", so it's like having three PCI slots. I daisy-chain two docks on one Thunderbolt bus (so 8 drives) and can stack more as needed. That's like having 8 (or more) drives in one PCIe slot. I stack multiple MOTU AVB interfaces AND the UAD Satellites on another TB buss - so that's like having 3 (or more) PCIe cards on one slot. You can see where I'm going with this.... the TB configuration is more expandable than the old PCIe system - and I could use a Thunderbolt PCIe chassis if I really needed to use cards.
- I wanted 4k monitor support as Logic X is too big and chunky on my old 30" 2560x1600 monitors. Logic on a 4k monitor is sick. I also wanted the ability to go to more monitors than I could on the tower.
- I wanted to use the new MOTU AVB series interfaces which operate best via Thunderbolt. Also AVB is supported from the built-in Ethernet jacks on Macs that came equipped with Thunderbolt, so there's some flexibility there.
When the cylinder first came out people moaned because they thought that it had LESS expansion possibilities, but I have found the opposite to be true in my case. I can now stack up more drives, more monitors, more UAD boxes, just more more more of everything than I could on my towers. People said, "Now I have all these Thunderbolt cables running everywhere when before it was all inside the tower" but I had a zillion cables coming out of the tower anyway, and many of them were dead / slow / archaic tech like DVI-D, FireWire 800 and the old MOTU connection between its card and interfaces. Now the cables are faster and smaller and the whole rig that took a refrigerator-sized rack is just an eight-space rack with two cylinders on top. I used to have the fridge across the room, connected to the work station via $300 Gefen 50-foot DVI-D cables, USB extenders, blah blah blah. Now it's just a little, silent cube that can sit behind my work station.
It was not cheap to make the switch. It was more about future-proofing my rig for another few years, rather than relying on discontinued gear. Every single piece in my old rig, from the computers to the audio interfaces, has been discontinued, so if I had a failure I would need to hit up eBay and start buying used stuff. Not desirable in my line of work.
I have found the new cylinders to "feel" faster - this may be because of the fast video cards, the fast internal drive, faster RAM, or whatever - I don't know or care which, but the system as a whole does feel quicker and more powerful. I can't even get close to maxing out the CPU on the cylinder when using Logic. Most of my biggest cues are taxing the CPU meter by less than 25% in Logic.
I use the 12-core cylinder for Logic, and the 6-core for ProTools HD Native Thunderbolt with Avid MADI. The two systems connect via MADI so I can spray 64 channels across at once, on a $6 cable. A big improvement from my old rig which used ADAT cables to connect the two and only gave me 24 channels, while requiring a pair of 192 interfaces on the ProTools machine. So the new rig may not be twice as fast or whatever, but about a zillion things have improved and each gotten a bit faster, so overall it feels much faster and slicker than before.
Lots of folks are still using silver towers, and there are lots of dudes on eBay selling CPU tray upgrades to bring the silver towers up to speed - but trying to implement ALL of the various improvements I've seen in the cylinders while still using the towers could get very pricey, and some things (Thunderbolt etc.) are just not possible on the towers. Plus you're throwing money at old / dead technology. So I said, screw it and dropped the coin.
I haven't done any hard testing to get "numbers" of how much faster (or slower) the cylinder is than the towers, because it wasn't really about that for me. I never really maxed out the CPU on the towers, but I DID max out on number of slots, number and resolution of monitors, number of drives on line, etc. It was all the expansion stuff, new interfaces, 4k monitors, etc. that finally drove me over the edge.
If you can live with the various shortcomings of continuing to use the towers (some major, some minor) then it can be a lot cheaper to stay there, especially if you've got a decent one that's still in good shape to use as a basis for upgrades. I will say that all of my towers still work fine, they aren't getting "worn out" or whatever, and the physical build quality of Apple products means that you often have products that last for many years longer than the underlying technology is relevant. I still have G4 and G5 computers that, physically at least, work fine - it's just that they are too slow, loud, and generally un-worthy to be up to the tasks of the modern software tools that I want to use. So for me it was, out with the old, in with the new.
