ISO50

I’m posting this reply against my better judgment as I suspect it will stir up that dead horse of a hornet’s nest that is the mac vs. pc debate. the truth is I’ve always used PC and I have never had a problem with it. I have used macs a lot, I find them slow and lethargic compared to the PC systems I’ve built. I was a computer science major in college so my background is well rooted in computer technology. If you know how to properly configure a windows machine (i.e. disable everything that isn’t absolutely necessary and strip the thing to it’s core) you will be rewarded with an amazingly fast computer. At this stage I make my living from computers and so any computer I bought or built would be a tax write-off, so money isn’t really the issue, the issue is getting the absolute best performance possible from the machine. I am very into hardware and the configurations of computer systems as it plays a key role in my work flow and therefore the final product whether it be music or design. So I am always researching benchmarks and hardware tests. The PC I was able to build blows doors off any Mac ever made, hands down. Photoshop performance is ridiculous and don’t get me started on audio apps, it’s crazy (it’s a water-cooled quad core intel extreme running near 5Ghz and cost half of what the comparable mac does). I run Vista Business 64 bit edition now, in the past I had been running XP64 / XP32. True, windows is a fundamentally flawed operating system, I am a firm believer that OSX is a superior operating system. this doesn’t mean it is the right choice when it comes to creating things. But at the end of the day it’s what works for you, I just happen to be a very impatient person and I also work on 24″x36″ @ 300dpi format PSD files which are around 300-600 layers deep and about 1-3 GB in size so I need top performance to even open these files. I have tried opening and working with them on comparably spec’ed macs (yes, the new intel ones) and it’s like pulling teeth just doing the simplest functions, just plain slow.
So that’s my experience, yours will differ, just throwing it out there. Bottom line is that I think Mac is great if you don’t want to spend a lot of time worrying about your computer, but if you have the time and inclination to truly understand how to configure and maintain windows you’ll definitely find it’s not the complete mess that every creative makes it out to be.

BTW, I’ve many musician / designer friends who swear by windows and know a couple more who’ve recently switched to windows from mac and are loving it. The other main issue is that I use Sonar to record / produce the Tycho stuff and it’s a PC-only app so I’ll always have to have a PC around (and no, I don’t like pro tools or logic so that’s not happening)
My 2 cents, you’re free to commence with the windows bashing now…….3..2..1.. GO!

but also, I’m installing OSX as a dual boot on this machine, so I’m not a totally lost cause.

It’s an Intel Extreme QX9650 quad core with 8gb ddr2 1033 ram , 3(x) raptor 10k rpm RAID0 array for the dedicated photoshop swap and 1TB sata2 main drive. Asus Maximus formula mobo Overclocked with liquid cooling.

antonio-
that missive definitely wasn’t targeted at you, guess I’ve just been wanting to get that off my chest since a lot of my friends give me a hard timme about using a PC. I’ll try to research this further and come back with some real numbers to back things up. like i said, I’d rather be using osx but i am just not convinced of the performance. You said a mac can hang with any PC on the market, and i agree with you as far as preconfigured systems… but I still don’t believe a mac could touch the sort of stuff you can build yourself. but yeah, i get the whole mac cult thing and have always been tempted to get into it…. perhaps /i will with this osx install on the new machine.

Justin-
since photoshop CS3 is a 32 bit application, this rig is a bit on the overkill side since 8GB ram is sort of pointless since PS can’t reference it all … but I pretty much built it with music in mind anyways, the quad core really comes into play when you start to work with a lot of effects and plugins.
as for cost, it came out to around $2500, and that’s with all the bells and whistles and the water cooling system… so it’s not that bad. you could come in considerably lower than that if you just backed the specs down a bit. for instance, the CPU alone was $1000, which is ridiculous, but it’s an unlocked cpu so you can overclock it pretty hard. but there are comparable quad core intels you can overclock to around 3.2GHz that go for around $500. And you could probably get away with no water cooling on those and around 4GB ram so that would significantly reduce the price. Also, that processor sucks up the juice so I had to get a kilowatt power supply, which isn’t cheap. minus all that, you could probably get a somewhat comparable rig for right around $1500.