Going from a Hackintosh to a Mac Pro, some tips needed.

[LeperousDust]

Even more sensible, let someone else pay for it first!

[Mark]

Don't tempt me to go looking. I've wanted a Mac Pro for a while. Thankfully I don't have access to the HE discount, otherwise my credit card would be bleeding by now.

[LeperousDust]

Feek didn't either *ahem*

[Darryn]

Originally Posted by Feek

Memory
Dreeds has suggested this site here for memory. Prices look good, anyone know of anywhere bettererererer?

Thats me...

Yup, i bought 8gb (4x2gb) for my Macpro a while ago from these guys, it came very quickly and works perfectly, when im less poor ill be ordering another 8gb for this Macpro and maybe 4 for my old Macpro.

One thing that does trouble me is Firefox? why? i used to use it and found it very nice, but I switched to Safari and find it does everything Firefox does, but generally faster and thing look nicer (if thats possible, or just my imagination) I really like the ability in Safari to cut a piece of a website and have it as a Live Dashboard Widget, great for watching Auctions and stuff like that.

[Mark]

I found plenty of sites that didn't load with the older Safari, but I admit I switched to Firefox at that point and didn't switch back, so I haven't really tried with Safari 3.

[Feek]

I have a further ponderence.

I was thinking about getting 16Gb of RAM, just because I can but I'm now thinking that I might be better off spending the cash on 8Gb of RAM and an Apple TV instead for silent streaming to the telly using the HDMI port instead of faffing about with the external hard drive on my noisy Xbox

What'd'ya reckon?

[Daz]

16GB of RAM?!?! What the fudge would you do with that?! I have production ESX servers running big SQL DB's with less RAM than that.

From what I understand AppleTV isn't very friendly with it's format support but works pretty slick. Well, like an iPod really. If you're aright with that it'll certainly be a quieter option than the 360.

[Burble]

Originally Posted by Feek

What'd'ya reckon?

I reckon that 16Gb of RAM is overkill. I'm all for having boxes sized properly but IMO that's OTT.

Apple TV is a very interesting idea, something I have been meaning to look into.

[Darryn]

IMO, a MacMini is a better solution that Apple TV, it can do all the same stuff and much more.

[Mark]

Originally Posted by Daz

16GB of RAM?!?! What the fudge would you do with that?! I have production ESX servers running big SQL DB's with less RAM than that.

I agree with this. Apple hardware certainly loves to have bucketloads of RAM, a lot more than even Windows, but unless you're running heavy apps like video editing or Photoshop with RAW images, then 8GB, or even 4GB is enough.

From what I understand AppleTV isn't very friendly with it's format support but works pretty slick.

The Apple TV, like most other things, can be hacked, including support for quite a few additional formats. If you just want an 'it works' solution, then a hacked Apple TV should work well.

Mac Mini isn't a bad option either. Runs silent until you load it, and even then isn't loud. Doesn't have HDMI (at least mine doesn't, may have been added), but does have DVI. Can also, easily, be made to just work. If all you want is a media server then the Apple TV route still makes sense.