I was sitting in my office the other day, working away on my MacBook Pro. Let it be known that I love my setup. 15″ MBP with a 23″ cinema display leaves me in dual monitor heaven… However, I got to thinking, man, I wish I had a pimped out Mac Pro to take things to the next level.
As you may or may not know, I do a lot of web and print design… and it is not uncommon for me to have Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, a few FTP programs, my handy newsreader, and about 24 Firefox tabs opened at the same time. While my MBP performs beautifully, the thought of a brand new Mac Pro makes my arms numb, and it’s not because of the fatty foods I’ve been eating recently.
‘Well, lets go check it out’ I thought… and off I went to price out an ideal Mac Pro for me. I didn’t want anything too crazy, just something that could perform to the level I needed. I would of course have to pick up another display to keep my ‘duelies’ going. Lets see what I chose and what the pricetag was!
Ok, lets head to Apple, click on Store, Mac Pro starting at $2799… Ok I’m there. Now lets configure this bad boy:
- Processor: I’ll be needing Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core) ($800 upgrade)
- Memory: 4GB should do me nicely ($500 upgrade). Stock is 2GB, and you can upgrade all the way up to 32GB for another $8600!!! Why must memory be so darn expensive through Apple?
- RAID Card: Yep, I’ll take one of those. ($800 upgrade)
- Hard Drives: Well, lets get 2. One main drive and another used for storage and backup. Lets upgrade the first to 500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s (a $50 upgrade) and ditto for the second drive as well. I should note, on a Mac Pro there are 4 hard drive bays.
- Graphics Card: Ok, things are starting to get a bit pricy, but I’ve got to go with the mid-road 3 x ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB ($260 upgrade).
- Displays: Yep, I’ll need an extra 23″ Apple Cinema Display ($899 upgrade). Already have another 23″ here in the office.
- Extra Optical Drive: Nah, I don’t do a lot of burning, think I’ll leave this one out.
- Airport Extreme Card: Yep ($50 upgrade).
- Software and Extras: Fibre Channel Card, modem, Mighty Mouse, Keyboard, OS X Server, plus all of the other software up for offer… I think I’ll pass.
- Apple Care Protection Plan: Lets leave this out for now. I can always purchase it at a later date ($249 upgrade).
So what’s the damage? $5,558 USD. Expensive!!! If you subtract the monitor ($899) and RAID card ($800), the system all of a sudden comes in at a more respectable $3,859. Much better. Still expensive, but I would think manageable for those out there that are considering a serious step up in performance.
Anyone I’ve talked to that owns a Mac Pro swears by it. The system is lightning quick, solid, and extremely expandable and upgradeable. They are expensive, but in my books you get what you pay for. For the design professional that needs a solid in-house system, you can’t argue with the Mac Pro. For a design geek like myself that is often on the go, and needs the extra portability, you’ll have no problem getting by on a MacBook Pro… as long as you have a nice big monitor to go with it when you’re at your home base 🙂
I wish I could justify spending that amount at this time… While Apple does have business financing options, it’s not something I’d consider at this point, especially when you consider my system is running fine (knock on wood). Only bad thing is it does ‘chug’ from time to time when I get the spinning marble of doom.
So, are there any other Mac Pro users out there that have any advice for me? Keep what I’ve got going here? Or would you rather see me go ahead and drop the cash, take the leap, dive off the deep end?
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TAGS: Mac Pro
