Given the current economy, I didn’t want to buy a new Mac since my older G5 was still working well. However, the “time marches on” problem emerged in that all of the new libraries were no longer compatible with my system. It was either upgrade or fade into production oblivion.

Thus, began the headache inducing journey of what to do which included comparing staying on the G5 and going to a newer, faster PC which would be current to the max, but would also require that I put more time into relearning Windows 7.

To dual Xeon or not to dual Xeon
that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of Windows 7,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles with Snow Leopard,
And by opposing end them?
Pencil, paper: quill and ink
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That system integration woes are heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be missed.

So from Mahler I migrated to ark.intel.com, endless pro/con commentary on the forums, consulting sessions with those in the know, reading CPU review after CPU review, et al. After six weeks, the end of all my research boiled down to these two words: I dunno.

How do I love, thee, Advil?
Let me count the hours.

So here’s my decision.

I decided to go with the Mac Pro 12-Core system for now because I wanted to simplify my production life and get rid of old computers, black spaghetti, and a lot of other stuff.

So I got that, four hard drives, and went to Other World Computing and got 24GB RAM which I can expand to 32GB RAM which I can expand to 64GB RAM. Money: I can add an extra 8GB RAM for about a $100 which is about the same as the price of a one terabyte Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive. So rather than expand with hard drives, I expand with RAM.

I then made a hard core business decision that I would restrict that computer to primarily 64bit libraries in Kontakt and VSL since with Kontakt I can load tons into RAM. And VSL is very efficient in its own right.

To simplify more, I got Vienna Ensemble PRO which reads all the cores in the Mac Pro system.

End Result: I now have a very efficient system and work routine. Today, that is!