please help me buy new computer

[syncsailor]

just bought logic8 and i am thoroughly happy with the program. but even though they listed the minimum requirements as a 1.25g G4 (i have a 1.33g G4 powerbook with 1.5g of ram), i've hit an unfortunate roadblock. With a 512 buffer size and a 44.1khz sample rate, i am only able to record 5 tracks of audio with no inserts. adding one instance of sound designer adds as much as 20% to the cpu load according to the activity monitor. I've run the apple script mentioned elsewhere in this forum. It helps a little but not much. sooooo.......

 

It looks like new computer time for me. And i'm not sure if i should go with the 2.8g iMac or the mac pro. let me temprarily ignore the difference in firewire ports, etc for right now. Is the processor speed the most important thing in increasing my track count or is it the number of cores? or something else.

 

I would most appreciate some advice on this issue. if it makes any difference, i'm a fairly heavy user. running quite a bit of outboard gear and alot of external synths. also, i'm also using the MOTU Ultralite as the converter.

 

thanks for any help.

syncsailor

[syncsailor]

also, does anyone know if the 400 and 800 firewire on the imac have a shared bus?

[CERBERE242]

hello

I think that they have only one firewire bus shared

the basic difference between imac and pro :

imac are basically built around laptop components, at the same frequency the pro will always be quicker

 

pro : the pci... it opens you the door to dsp (uad..), pthd... the track counts with a pci audio interface is higher also

 

the basic question : will you be more nomad, do you have a nice tft ? the imac screen is hard to beat.. it's an elegant all in one solution

 

if you don't need expansion I would go to Imac and remember that event he basic Imac is more powerful versus and "old" G5 (hum hum) . The money spared could be allocated to some expansions of your studios or your mac ( more ram, raid/firewire hd, a nice reverb,plugs..)

 

regards

[davidgary73]

Hi syncsailor. If you're a heavy user, i would suggest to get the MacPro. I do own a MacPro Quad Core 2.66 MHz and am using Motu Ultralite too. Used up all the 4 HD slots which comes up to 1.2 Terabytes.

 

As what CERBERE242 said, if you need not the expansions, imac would be a better choice but if you have the cash, go for the MacPro.

 

Cheers

[Homina]

You describe yourself as a heavy user. That implies that you'll need a lot of processing power, that you'll be interfacing a lot of gear, and placing serious demands on the machine at all levels. A Mac Pro's expandability make it the logical choice for that kind of use. Four SATA2 drive bays, three PCI slots, and eight RAM slots could easily make the difference between realizing an idea and being frustrated in pursuing it. An iMac might get things moving for you, but could easily be an obstacle down the road. A Mac Pro costs a great deal more, but also does a great deal more.

 

RAM will make tons of difference in performance, regardless of the machine you use. The speed of your hard drives will also make a big difference. (Before you buy anything, be sure to check out BareFeats' web site. They place real-world demands on various products and report unvarnished results. It's a great place to visit for someone in your situation.) Without signing away your first-born, internal SATA2 drives are the fastest, cheapest choice. Even the fastest processor will be held hostage by an environment that cannot make use of its speed. All components have to be capable of it for you to achieve any given level of performance.

 

AFAIK, all Macs - and PCs for that matter - ship from the factory with a single chip controlling each bus. And whether you use a 400 or 800 port, it's still the same FW bus. There may be exceptions, but I've never seen one. This has an impact on usability for high-bandwidth applications (audio and video) in that you can expect trouble if you place heavy demands on two devices on the same bus. If you must use a FW drive and audio interface, for example, you'll be MUCH better off installing a PCI card to create a second distinct bus. This applies to every bus in a machine. Due to its sheer speed an adverse impact will be less obvious on SATA than other busses, but it's still there. It's also advisable to keep your apps and data storage on different drives. Programs requires frequent disk access, which will limit accessibility to data or anything else on the same disk.

 

All of the above reinforce a Mac Pro as the better choice.

[rmaclema]

Agree with previous posters, but...

 

But the iMac is a damn fine machine. I run an iMac Core Two Duo 2 GHz with only one GB RAM and use Logic Pro 7.2 and my system works great - the CPU barely breaks a sweat.

 

There is one other advantage of the iMac - it's extremely quiet! Whereas the Mac Pro tower, um, is not.

 

But if I were made of money, I'd buy the Mac Pro tower and Apple's biggest monitor - no doubt about it.

[AC55]

syncsailor, I started 8 up on a G4 1.25 and quickly saw it was not going to cut it - so I had a new Imac 2.4 quad core at work and brought it home to see how it fared. Everything loaded up and ran fine but I foresaw running into roadblocks with expandability ie. internal drives, ram "PCI" slots and because I wanted to go with apogee converters with symphony I would need PCI. So I spent the bucks for a 3.o Quad. right now it has 4 g of ram but I'll be adding 4 more soon. The machine also came with 2 500 gig drives and I have just added 2 more 750 gig drives (Seagates, same as the mac comes with - the 750's are on sale this weekend at Fry's for $179.00...not bad for 750 gigs). Anyhow, I've just finished optimizing and installing Logic and everything is running smoothly this far. They sent me the wrong PCI interface card for my Apogee Rosetta, so I haven't been able to configure that yet. I'll post again when it comes in and I get it up and running. BTW I didn't load Leopard for Logic - still in Tiger till things shake out

Hope I've helped somehow!

 

AC55

[humberto]

just bought logic8 and i am thoroughly happy with the program. but even though they listed the minimum requirements as a 1.25g G4 (i have a 1.33g G4 powerbook with 1.5g of ram), i've hit an unfortunate roadblock. With a 512 buffer size and a 44.1khz sample rate, i am only able to record 5 tracks of audio with no inserts. adding one instance of sound designer adds as much as 20% to the cpu load according to the activity monitor. I've run the apple script mentioned elsewhere in this forum. It helps a little but not much. sooooo.......

 

It looks like new computer time for me. And i'm not sure if i should go with the 2.8g iMac or the mac pro. let me temprarily ignore the difference in firewire ports, etc for right now. Is the processor speed the most important thing in increasing my track count or is it the number of cores? or something else.

 

I would most appreciate some advice on this issue. if it makes any difference, i'm a fairly heavy user. running quite a bit of outboard gear and alot of external synths. also, i'm also using the MOTU Ultralite as the converter.

 

thanks for any help.

syncsailor

 

 

no no no no, you DO NOT need a new computer.

 

your computer is fast enough, if anything you need to go back to logic 7 because it uses less CPU and it can do more then logic 8!

 

With logic 8 your going to need a new mac, thats how apple made logic 8, it was made that way on purpose, so only newer faster apples can run it.

[syncsailor]

Wow. Thanks to all of you. This is fantastic information. And thank you Homina for the Barefeats link. Can't believe i've been using macs for 18 years and never heard of this guy.

 

AC55 - you mentioned that you had 4gig of ram and were adding more. I was under the impression that Logic could not utilize more than 4 gigs. is this not true?

 

Also... do you all think that Apple plans to improve logics ability to take advantage of multiple cores? i think that would pull me over to the Mac Pro side for sure.

 

thanks again,

Tommy