Friday, November 11, 2011

Earthkiller Machine

I'm neither an Apple nor a Microsoft partisan. Nor do I advocate Intel over ATI. Heck, I don't get spittin' mad over Neve versus SSL. Wait, what blog am I writing?
Anyway, as I sit and wait on renders, I think more upon having a simply earth-killing computer machine.
Macs have traditionally offered us the advantage of interoperability of their files with labs and other studios. But I'm deeply afraid of Apple's ability to be total buttheads and trashing professional support.
The dual hex-core from Apple is $5649 while the dual hex-core from Dell is, oddly, $5420. The big difference between the Apple and the Dell is the video card. But the "Apple tax" isn't terribly high on the very expensive machines.
But I have no way to compare video cards to one another because video cards are a dark science of occult which burns the souls of all ye who dare approach.
The other strange thing is that the Dell actually comes with no real operating system. FreeDOS is what it has. I don't know what that's all about.
An Apple dual quad-core is $4149. So it's .73 the price of the hex-core and (theoretically) .66 the number of cores. Right? Who knows? My math is fuzzy.
These Apple machines are both spec'ed with the better video card that Apple has.

Dell's dual hex-core with 12GB of RAM.
The last two facts here are that Apple makes a (generally) stable machine. And the 24 months 0% financing is like... well it depends on what you think of interest. A couple hundred bucks? A thousand bucks?
Who knows?

4 comments:

Lindsay Stewart said...

farg-bargling apple.... sank a bag of sheckles on a used 8 core this morning, delivery this week. will surely be a nice treat once up and active but money and money and money. then its the switch to cs5.5, then its the mercury compatible card, then it's more ram... and then and then and then. oh argh.

Lindsay Stewart said...

also, when considering video cards, if you are considering the leap to cs5.5 these are the only currently supported cards...

GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro FX 4800 (Windows and Mac OS)
Quadro 4000 (Windows and Mac OS)

and the apple tax will come back like a mofo on these babies.

Andrew Bellware said...

Crappity.

Poop poop poop.

These cards aren't even options when buying a new Mac Pro.

Why? Apple? Why? The one things you guys do well is have standardized hardware!

Thanks for posting though, that's really important.

Now: does it really matter if I put two cards in my machine or just one?

Lindsay Stewart said...

well that depends on the girth of your cards. one slot or two. i can't afford to drop $7-800 on a video card just how and since i also can't afford upgrading to cs5.5 straight away, i'll be using a hopped up 1GB Radeon card I've got laying about for now. as for indulgence, i'm switching the edit suite over to a couple of 23" asus led flat panels. light, inexpensive, put out very little heat, wide viewing angle and low energy consumption.