[tkmd]

After owning PB's I made the switch to MP. The reasons I did it were the following:

- I have been moving some of my movie collection to h264- on my AL PB (via Handbrake) I could manage 5-7 FPS- so a movie would take on the order of 36 hours. Whats worse was the heat generated eventually fried my hd.

- upgradability - when I had to replace my PB hd it was such a PIA. I love the idea of these hd "sleds" in the MP

- multitasking. I really thrash OS X - encode a movie in the back round, Imovie in the front while surfing the web. Although OS X did a good job with what it had (a G4 w/1.5 GB memory) I could really slow the interface down

Well I am excited, it wont ship for another couple of days but I wanted to thank to the forum members for helping me out with picking the display etc. BTW I wanted to buy another stick of ram and on this site there are two option 512x2 and 1GB. I dont understand the this "fully buffered" thing so if someone could suggest which one is better (if there is a difference).

[brokenjago]

I think you'll really enjoy this machine. I can encode a DVD in H.264 at about 35-45 FPS, so that'll be a massive improvement.

The Mac Pro uses specialized memory called FB-DIMMs (Fully Buffered Dual Inline Memory Modules.) I would not reccomend going anywhere other than Crucial or OWC for RAM upgrades to the Mac Pro, as it has very stringent requirements when it comes to the heatsinks. They need to be oversized so that the chips can be properly cooled inside the computer, or you'll start getting ECC correctable errors, which are very bad.

Enjoy! I know I love mine!

[thebunny]

Go Crucial if you're rich. There's a whole thread about where people get their memory. Congrats on the machine. I'm waiting for mine now.