As you can probably imagine, this is where my experience with the Mac just went ballistic! There I am with little experience in the multi-processor realm (in Mac terms this is folks – I’ve had dual proc PCs since Jeebus was a kid!) and I click on the button to order the behemoth!
I went for the Dual Quad-Core 2.8Ghz variety, standard 2Gb RAM, single 500Gb disk and two Super drives (I say why not)!
Of course this isn’t where it stopped, oh no! I was upgrading my Infrant (NetGear) ReadyNAS NV+ to 1Tb disks so I had 4 x 500Gb disks coming available, so in three of them went. As well as disks, I settled for another 4Gb RAM, yep, you guessed it, straight from our friends at Crucial so now I was cooking on 6Gb RAM with room for more if I wanted it.
On top of that, you have USB2 a-plenty, Firewire 400 and 800 ports, two Gbit Ethernet ports and the usual digital/analogue audio ports and it’s so quiet too. Even at full steam it’s nowhere near as noisy as some Windows workstations I’ve used from Dell/HP.
This thing ROCKS!
I’ve not seen anything like it, as an example, I can transcode a 42 minute TV show in AVI format down to iPod/iPhone format in a little over 3 minutes, 4 tops! All 8 cores singing away nicely, with Handbrake reporting well over 200 fps!
Whereas I used to use iMovie to mess around with video, well, it’s not that great with multiple processors, so I thought perhaps it was time for some Final Cut action, such a good move! This thing eats video!
I will go into the list of software I have but there’s nothing this thing can’t do. Teamed up with some nice monitors (unfortunately my budget didn’t stretch to Apple displays) this is nevertheless the best thing anyone could want at home, if you ask it to do it, you will not be disappointed!
This is essentially my work machine. The fun machine is next 
More later on this one!
PL
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