Ok guys. I got a few Mac gift cards for Christmas from my girlfriend's family because they are sick of hearing me bitch about my PC always being messed up.

Here is what I do on my PC:

I record no more than 12 tracks simultaneous through an FW-1884. At most during mixdown I'll have 30 mono audio tracks, but most of the time it is about 20. I normally record at 44.1, but every now again will do small acoustic sessions at 96k. I'll be using some outboard gear (compressors and EQ) and the reverbs/delays and such will be handled with plugins. Right now I'm running Cubase SX 2 on PC, but will be switching to Logic or DP once I get the Mac.

Now:

I'm looking at an iMac G5 with a gig of ram to handle this for me without latency or crashing bullcrap issues. Is this a reasonable request? Should I get a Firewire HD or just record to the internal HD?

I read all of the iMac posts and the only thing relevant to performance was a gentlemen talking about 32 stereo VST instruments. I don't run VST instruments so that is gibberish to me. I don't know what that calculates to when dealing with 30 mono audio tracks stack with reverb, distortion, and delay. I'm worried more about overall performance and latency issues.

Merry Christmas!