Which Mac Pro?

[gymacscuba]

Being in "Dell Hell" for the last 10 years I recently joined the force with the purchase of a MacBook Pro 15" i7 8G RAM.

Now that I'm use to working on the MBP processing photos with Lightroom 3 and CS5 it's agonizing using my 6 year old Dell Inspiron with it's Pentium 4 chip and 4G RAM.

I have been struggling back and fourth between going the 27" iMac route or getting a 27" Apple Cinema Display to use with the MBP and adding a Mac Pro sometime down the road rather sooner than later.

I'm fortunate to be able to purchase Apple products at a 25% discount so I pulled the trigger this evening and ordered the ACD.

Now my dilemma is which Mac Pro to get? I'm going to wait at least 2-3 months to replenish the funds. Will the Sandy Bridge processers make their way to the Mac Pro line initally or will they first go into the new iMac/MBP updates?

The range would be between the base 2.8GHz Quad, upgrade to the 3.2GHz Quad or 3.3 GHz Quad or go for the base 2.4GHz 8-Core. I'll upgrade the memory from OWC as soon as I would order the system and probably wait a bit to add an additional hard drive and add an SSD as prices continue to drop.

While I'm pretty sure the 8 Core is probably overkill for my needs at this moment, as I currently do not do any video editing using a Nikon D300, I'm quite sure my next camera will have HD video and I may even get a dedicated video camera to shoot underwater video as well.

Thanks Everyone

 

[Vylen]

Sandy Bridge will most likely be out on the MacBooks and iMacs first. While server grade SB processors will be out soon, they're probably not the ones that would be used in a future Mac Pro. The SB processors that they would most likely use wont be out till the the 3rd quarter.

So you most likely wont be seeing a new Mac Pro in the 2-3 months you're going to take to replenish your funds

As for what Mac... go for the 6-core 3.33Ghz for optimal performance. I don't know what work you do in CS5, but just going by the fact you use Lightroom 3.

The 6 core is just a few hundred more than the 8 core and while there's 2 more cores in the latter, it has a slower clock speed.

And based on these benchmarks for LR3, the 6-core wins on top in RAW importing (amongst machines you can actually buy amongst 2010 models - that 12 core 3.33 Ghz is a "custom" machine).