Which powerMac

[ToanNguyen]

Good day,
I have the powerbook 15'' for about 1 year now and I love it. I am thinking of buying the powerMac also soon. I will start doing a lot of illustration mostly with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Do you guys have any suggestion of what power mac should I get? I am leaning towards the Dual 2.3 GHz. Do you think it is worth it to shell out about 1000$ more to get the Quad 2.5GHz. Or should I just use my powerbook for now and wait for the Quad powermac to come down in prize?
Thank you in advance for all your suggestion.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Hi ToanN Welcome to MR

It really comes down to how much PS and Illustrator work you are doing. If you are going to be doing graphic work professionally, and will have a volume of paying work esp. large, high resolution Photoshop manipulation, the the Quad is probably the way to go. That is - if you are in the position where every 15 seconds wasted is costing you real money or billable time.

However if you are just starting out professionally, or a student, or are doing Web work on Photoshop (not high res) the marginal benefit of the Quad vs. the extra $$$ it costs probably isn't there.

Illustrator isn't too much of a challenge, either machine will handle it (even my dual 1.25 G4 handles Illustrator with aplomb).

Absent evidence to the contrary, I would go for the 2.3 or even the Dualcore 2.0 which is the bang for the buck champ of the three. Make sure you get if from Apple with the minumum memory and pop 2 Gb of RAM into it purchased from a reputable third party seller. Don't go for any build-to-order specials from Apple, its easy to install another hard drive.

Two things I would budget for however, are
1) A good big external Firewire drive you can clone your main drive to, and make regular backups to, with some software that makes it easy to schedule backups. All hard drives will fail. Guaranteed. Your defence is a bulletproof backup system.

2) A decent battery back up power supply.
(as in, APC with min. 650VA capacity, not a P.O.S. Belkin)
Most power failures are for 1 or 2 seconds, just long enough to crash your machine and lose your work (and possibly damage the data structure of your drive). But even if the power goes out for 5 hours (as it did on Thursday here) a battery backup gives you the time to shut your machine down in an orderly fashion instead of crashing.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

 

[ToanNguyen]

Thank you very much, Trevor.
That is very much helpful. I really appreciate it.
I just start out to do more graphic works. Mostly fashion illustration. I usually use traditional method by hand but now, I would like to expand it with computer.
I think I will go with the dual 2.3 then.
Again, much appreciated.
Toan Nguyen

 

[bigus7674]

Maybe it's a previous model...

Actually, I was reading your post and thought that this link could be of help to you:

http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/10/25/dualcorebenchmarks/index.php

This is the initial benchmark tests of the new dual core machines versus the previous dual processor models. The dual 2.7Ghz model still outperforms the new dual core machines, except in terms of FPS (frames per second) in games. And, unless you want the newest technology, ie PCI Express slots versus PCI / PCI-x, then for a couple hundred more you could get the dual 2.7Ghz model and have more overall power than either of the dualcore models. Hope this helps.