Here’s my delima. I need to buy a Mac by February 1st. I really don’t want to buy a new Mac Pro because Apple is supposed to be releasing new models later this year. I’m thinking about:
A) buying a Used 2010 8 core Mac Pro
B) buy a new iMac and then selling it when the new Mac Pros come out
C) buy a new Mac mini to hold me over until mid year, then use it as a render machine
What do you think I should do?
Thanks in advance,
Brad
Thanks PerryDS.
Artbot, I’ve considered it. I used to work on PCs back in the windows NT days. I was constantly updating drivers and fixing bugs. It was a real waist of time. Is that no longer the case?
For someone not doing anything weird, then it would work as well as working on Mac. If you want to get into gaming you can run into problems, but for 3D programs there’s not much issue. Windows 7 is quite stable and does a good job of keeping up to date.
It’d be worth considering since you could get more power for the amount you want to spend.
What are you looking to do? If it’s just a spot of modelling for the time being, a Mini will do just fine. They are remarkably capable. If you’re looking to do heavier stuff, like simulations and rendering, see about getting an older refurb Mac Pro from the online Apple store.
DutchDimension, Thanks for your reply. I’m a 3D generalist so I do a little of everything. I just got laid off and I have the opportunity to support some of the clients from the company because they no longer off 3D services. By the way, I was using a Mac Pro 2.8 GHz 8 core with 10 gigs of RAM. I guess I’m going to go with a used 8 core unless someone has a better option.
Thanks again to everyone for weighing on in this.
Windows 7 is stable, reliable & easy to use.
It doesn’t have much in common at all with the bad old days of Windows NT (which was a server OS, more than a decent desktop/workstation OS to begin with).
I use Win 7 without any special antivirus software, and so far, no significant spyware/malware infections have occurred either.
Ditto for a PC/Win7. Freedom to build your own machine according to your own needs without having to spend enough to buy a small car for the same hardware or inferior is also a plus. With the saved money you could, i.e, setup a gigabit network at home 
Now I’m on the fence again. PC users, if you had around $3,500 USD to spend on a machine, what would you buy?
I would go for something like an i7 3930k processor which I would think is faster than the dual Xeons in current Mac Pro’s. You could max out on memory, you could even get a Quadro 4000 if you wanted or one of the best gaming graphics cards. That type of system wouldn’t even cost $3,500 though.
You could even do a dual processor workstation system with newer Xeons, like a LGA 2011 system with dual six-core processors would be within your range I think.
for that money…3 computers with i7-3930 (12 threads) with 32-64GB RAM, one as ws, rest for rendering.
Or 5-6 computers with i7-2600k + o/c.
or one dual xeon (24 threads) if you run fluid sims…
Sounds good. I’m not a build your own computer kind of guy. Where would you recommend I order a prebuilt machine?
Im pretty sure he wont… OS fights are silly anyway. Ppl take this stuff way to personal.
He always could just get the same parts that are in a mac while assembling his pc. So in case he doesnt like windows 7 he could always install mac os on it 
From my experience what you custom built and what professional built is not the same, and he can always install windows on mac, it ran very smoothly.
