My direction... and well... a bit about me and why...
First off... I'm a Sr. Unix admin for a large University. I used to have a nice Sun box for my home workstation. Then Oracle came along and destroyed Sun. So.. I bought a MacPro 3,1 and decked it out as much as possible. Basically, a rebellion against Oracle and also for the fact that when I'm home and have free time I enjoy some good gaming. Call it what it is, I've been playing Everquest since July of 1999 during the early pre-beta days and am still going strong in the best damn high end guild in game. I also enjoy Skyrim and a few others. Recently, my wife and I approved some new PC's. She's getting a new Macbook Pro and I well.. The 2012 hex. My current 2008 3,1 is going to replace my Freenas box and run OSX Server for Timemachine, DNS, DHCP, web, wiki, etc.
I realize the new Macpro is coming... For me however, the ability to upgrade the graphics card and anything else that might come up makes the 2012 a better buy. I hope before the next time I desire to upgrade and the budget nazi (wife) agrees that Apple returns to an upgradable machine. The trashcan while very nice at the get go will obviously become a throw away can after a few years. So basically, I'm going to put my nifty nice new ATI radeon 7970 in a brand new 2012 hex and hope and wait. My 2008 Macpro 3,1 will become my new NAS server either running Freenas or OSX server and the old Freenas will be retired.
So what I ordered was a brand new from Apple, 32gb ram, 512 SSD, 3.33 ghz 6-core, that I plan to add my 7970, 3gb DDR5 video card too as well as my 2x 1.5TB 10k sas drives too. Should be a good work box and gaming box for the next few years or at least until Apple pulls their collective heads our of their asses and makes a box that I can customize to my needs and upgrade reasonably for at least a few years. The new trashcan to me is a wicked nice Macpro that is a dead end as soon as the next great thing comes out. That to me obsolescence planned way too soon. I don't have unlimited funds and I want to be able to upgrade my PC as needed without a full drop and replace. So..... here's to hoping the Macpro 2012 HEX lasts me until such time as Apple rejoins the demand of the marketplace
