A good computer and OS to produce music with?

[savage_g]

After years of building cobbled together PCs, have just broken the bank and got one of the new 8core mac pros. I can honestly say I'll never switch back to PC again. OS X is as stable as an os can possibly be; it just doesnt have all the unnecessary windows conventions and bugs. Logic is the daddy of all DAWs as well.

Argument could be made that mac is too expensive, but after trying to price up a identically specced PC to build, the mac came out a good deal cheaper.

You also get a real quality machine for your money; you KNOW the build quality is far better than a home build and certainly way better than a dell workstation or the like. The Mac Pro is also whisper quiet which is a major consideration for music (after getting sick of building powerful PCs for music which all ended up sounding like jet engines).

If you still want to run Windows, Boot Camp runs XP smoother than 99% of windows PCs out there; Vmware fusion is also superb for running windows programs in emulation with very little drop in performance.

Get a Mac!

 

[The Arkitekt]

If you still want to run Windows, Boot Camp runs XP smoother than 99% of windows PCs out there

thats bull, if you have a computer with the same hardware specifications as an apple computer (processor, ram, etc, (performance hardware), windows xp will run the same on there

 

[savage_g]

yeah but my point being you'll struggle to find a PC with the same kind of hardware specs as the Mac Pro for that price.

 

[The Arkitekt]

i can easily find parts as the same specs as a mac pro for less. apple insanely over charges for their hardware. i'm looking at the apple websites and they charge 1500 for 800mhz speed 8gb of ram. i can get 8 gb of 800mhz ram (good brand, OCZ RAM) for 150$ shipped from newegg.com. now thats what i call bullshit. they upcharge the price of ram by 1000%. go see for yourself

 

[Kontents]

The one complaint about apple I have is upgrading. Its so much more a breeze to do with a PC vs Mac. And PC's are built around upgrading to keep from having to buy a new computer after 3 years. Mac is all about marketing they sell sell sell.

 

[The Arkitekt]

if i was to need a mac system, i'd build a computer for a fraction of the price and load osx on it

 

[Shonsteez]

Hey Arkitekt - To my knowledge you cant put OSX on a windows based system???? If you can, ive never heard of that.
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When u cop a mac you basically just gotta go all out and buy as much RAM as it will allow and crank up the CPU....As long as you do that you honestly shouldnt have to upgade for a long ass time.

Even though u can build a PC for fractions of the cost of mac, and I agree the shit is highway robbery, its still in my honest opinion a better investment if your heavily into producing music or graphics.

The performance is just so streamlined in comparison to a PC that I honestly would never go back now as well. Even if i copped a PC with the same exact "specs" it wouldn't matter, because the heart of what makes a mac better IMO is the OS. OSX cant even be fucked with.

Plus you literally have to do nothing to tailor your machine for music production in order for it run as smooth as it can be.
I hated that with PCs you had to do a series of tasks just to get it nice and lean, plus just the way windows operates bugs the shit out of me now.

I would highly recommend the switch from PC to MAC for anyone looking to upgrade their computer. - This is coming from a long time windows user that finally saw the light.

 

[afriquedeluxe]

they say when you go mac, there's no turning back. get a mac as soon as you can afford it.

 

[7thangel]

build one, think about the future (x48 chipset mobo's will drop once intel comes with their new shit and these tend to have nuff pci-e slots and are ddr3 capable) or
http://www.adkproaudio.com/choose2.cfm
http://www.shop-sonica.com/systems_at_a_glance.cfm

 

[savage_g]

I agree about the RAm prices. Which is why u cop the base Mac Pro model and buy cheap ram from elsewhere. Trust I priced up a PC of the same spec as the Mac pro before I bought it, and it weighed in slightly more. Apple seem to have got a ridiculously good deal on the xeon chips and motherboard.

The imac and macbooks are way overpriced though.

Would be interesting to see how os x runs on a PC; have heard it can be a bit buggy with hardware compatibility, let us know how you get on with it if you go down that route. You have to remember that Apple are making an OS optimised to run on a range of 4 computers, where microsoft are going for compatibility on 1000s of machines.

 

[The Arkitekt]

Hey Arkitekt - To my knowledge you cant put OSX on a windows based system???? If you can, ive never heard of that.

yea it's been possible for some times now, since a little after mac changed there processors to intel

 

[The Arkitekt]

I agree about the RAm prices. Which is why u cop the base Mac Pro model and buy cheap ram from elsewhere. Trust I priced up a PC of the same spec as the Mac pro before I bought it, and it weighed in slightly more. Apple seem to have got a ridiculously good deal on the xeon chips and motherboard.

The imac and macbooks are way overpriced though.

Would be interesting to see how os x runs on a PC; have heard it can be a bit buggy with hardware compatibility, let us know how you get on with it if you go down that route. You have to remember that Apple are making an OS optimised to run on a range of 4 computers, where microsoft are going for compatibility on 1000s of machines.

if you configured a PC with the same specs as a mac and it costed more than your just looking in the wrong places. http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=942 <-- this is an article about someone building a mac equivalent (hardware spec-wise) pc and only for a third of the price. and apple probably does overprice their xeons too

yea i'd suspect OS X on pc to be buggy but i don't think theres any issues with hardware compatibility, althought finding drivers would be a bitch, you just have to make sure the hardware your running OS X on is some of the hardware apple uses in example the new gen intel processors and the intel gma950, so you could find the appropriate drivers

 

[mono]

the gma is the graphics media accelerator right ? i have it in my dell notebook, the 950, its sufficient for standard graphic uses, but not more than a crutch in terms of graphic intensive things like video editing or gaming. i wonder why apple should be using this...

 

[The Arkitekt]

i don't think apple uses it anymore, i think they've upgraded to the 965 which is actually pretty decent, but most of the time they use a dedicated graphics card

 

[Shonsteez]

yea it's been possible for some times now, since a little after mac changed there processors to intel

Oh thats crazy, i didnt know that. Well if you try it let me know how it goes. Im curious to see how stable OSX would run on a machine thats not solely made for it.

 

[mono]

me too