Goose3
8 March 2011
Greetings Recording.org's
I'm running an old dual 2.7 Power Mac G5 and looking to upgrade.
I'm currently running Cubase SX3 with MOTU HD192.
Question 1 - If I upgrade to the new Mac Pro and Cubase 6, is 8 core's going to give me a significant performance increase over the Mac Pro 4 core? Its a $1,000 difference between the 4 core and 8 core, and I'm sure everyone would prefer an extra grand in their pockets these days. Is the 8 core worth the extra grand?
Question 2 - those running Mac Pros, do you find it can handle a fair amount of native plugins? On the Power Mac I use a couple of UAD-1 cards but since there PCI cards they would be worthless in the new Mac.
Thanks for any help!
Comments
Here is a link to a thread at Gearslutz where people post the re
Here is a link to a thread at Gearslutz where people post the results on their hardware while running the Logic benchmark stress test.
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/371545-logic-pro-multicore-benchmarktest.html
Logic recently received a hyper thread update, that improved performance even more.
The sweet spot for the Mac pros appear to be the 6-core model, more powerful than the previous 8-cores.
Currently a Mac mini has more processing power than your current machine. The chart needs to be updated the current minis start with 2.4GHz core2duo CPUs.
For the last few years I've been using one of the early Intel minis as my main DAW, basic sessions of 32-48 tracks CPU rarely goes over 35%.
Unless you are using massive sample libraries, and cpu hungry effects, the 4-core would suit you well .
I have yet to see any one complain about maxing out their 4-core Macs, unless they were doing video also.
I just picked up a quad i7 Macbook Pro this weekend, still loading my software.
Also be aware that word on the street says Cubase has improved on the Mac, but PCs get better performance with Cubase.
Performance wise from my experience Logic is the most cpu friendly, then DP7, Cubase,and Live.