mac spec wanted

[jimmy west]

wanting to buy a mac for production purposes what spec sound and graphics cards do you recommend for it. Im putting it out to you lot

[ampassasinbirmingham]

u want portable or desktop?????

[professor]

do you plan on running a lot of plugs? what sort of sequencing host you thinking about?

[g]

not a smart ass reply: the best one you can afford.

if you're looking at laptops, don't do the ibook. the processors may be similar but the cache, ports and a few other key things are not the same. you'll want a pb if you're going laptop.

desktop, there are more choices. G4s are still plenty-to-very capable. If you do some homework, you can even buy one a few years old and upgrade the processor to something kick ass for less than you can buy a new machine with lesser specs. eshop.macsales.com and xlr8yourmac.com are good places to investigate upgrade issues.

that being said, a G5 is naturally still more powerful and a bit more future proof, depending on your needs.

[Basil Rush]

What ever you buy you'll max it out in about 2 weeks. Make sure you get a shed load of RAM (1Gb or more helps) as much processor as you can get your hands on too.

The only thing to do is to work out whether you'd be best off blowing all your money on the computer or wheter you should get some DSP cards to go along with it.

I'm a bit of a fan of DSP based stuff, Access Virus plugins and the Sony Oxford EQ on the powercore and the Universal Audio compressor emulations on the UAD-1 are well worth having.