After nearly 3 years of service, my Mac Pro has left the building… well, not literally, it’s still on the desk, but it won’t boot no more… RIP my old (but sometimes annoying friend)…

Since the machine is now dead, i have started to look at my next workstation… which i hope to have running by September for College… (more on that later)

Some options:

· New New MacPro: though i am thinking i don’t want to buy a Mac again, since i can’t really upgrade it (other than memory or HDD). The graphics are Mac Only (PC cards wont work) and there are only 4 drive bays for HDDs anyway…

· Dell Precision workstation: this is not a cheap option! Configured with just 2 2.66Gz Quad Core Xeons, this is just under 4 grand, BEFORE TAX!!! And i haven’t even done anything else!

· DIM (Do it MySelf…): this means finding a Dual Xeon Motherboard (since i have the processors and ram already). A good mobo should have enough ram slots (8 would be ideal), enough SATA slots (minimum of 6, more is better) and at least 2 x16 PCI Express 2 slots…

· DIM option 2… get a nice server Dual Xeon mobo, take the current ram and procs from the old MacPro and turn that into a server (don’t matter much about graphics in those…). then, get a new Nehalem dual proc board, which i have found one for about 350EUR, 2 Nehalem processors (not sure how much these are… ) and some DDR3 memory… add in a good graphics card or 2 and your laughing… maybe even water cool the machine… could be cheaper than the Dell…

Any thoughts? Should i just go Core i7 instead?