It wasn’t long ago that I was using a laptop as my primary machine. I thought I’d never buy another desktop. Nowadays the desktop machines blow the laptops away in performance. I use my laptop when I’m on the road, and look forward to getting home to my desktop.
I’m going to have a second work environment soon, having signed up for The Hive. I’m trying to decide exactly how I want to handle setting up both my home and 
work 
configurations.
My initial config at the Hive will likely be my 17″ PowerBook (or my MacBook) along with my old 22″ Cinema Display (yes, the original - from 1999 or 2000 I think). However, if my home set-up is nicer to use than my set-up at the Hive… well, there isn’t as much reason to go down to the Hive. 
I noticed that the Dell flat panel displays are really cheap now… what I really want to do is upgrade my home desktop machine to a Mac Pro, move my Quad to the Hive and get a couple of extra flat panels to have 2 displays at both locations. For the moment I’m resisting the temptation to invest prematurely.
I’m curious to see speed tests with the new 8 core Mac Pros, especially running virtual machines. The Photoshop and video tests I’ve seen don’t show much of a performance difference.
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Michael Sitarzewski adds this Comment:
I’ve made the decision to move to a desktop as the primary machine. I built my machine (and run OS X on it) so the specs are fantastic. I use my laptop for portability, working in the world until around 10AM, then use the desktop when I return home. The machines are wired with gigabit ethernet at my desk, so mounting the laptop over the network is about as fast (or faster) than a hard drive.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Alex G adds this Comment:
8 core xenon is a major, major waste of money… especially the way apple has priced.
downgrading from 2.6ghz to 2.0ghz nets you $299… the difference in retail between those are $350 as of 4/24/07 at newegg… downgrading two cpus to 2.0ghz should net you at least $600 less… not $300.
“latest and greatest” is a always a waste of money… unless you swimming in it, then by all means.
the only time when you need this kind of perfomance at such a premium is when you can provide 80-100% load for the majority of the time.
I have a Athlon 3500 with 2gb of ram as my workstation and about a terrabyte of storage with 10k raptor as boot drive. More than enough to run photoshop, vs.net and flash at the same time… with sql server and mysql in the back.
if you absolutely must have a mac, get a used 4 core… save yourself some money.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
I want to be able to run OS X along with 2-3 Windows instances and a couple of Linux instances at the same time. Seems like more cores would be good for that, assuming the software takes advantage of them.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Peter Cooper adds this Comment:
VMware Fusion deals with more cores a lot better than Parallels does and even lets you use multiple cores in the virtualized OS (though only two at this time).
As far as I recall from VMware on the PC (a long time ago now for me) there was a way to specify CPU affinity in the config file manually. Not sure if this is possible in VMware Fusion, but it wouldn’t surprise me as those guys are on the ball (unlike the Parallels lot).
April 24th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Alex G adds this Comment:
If you want to run 4 OSes at the same time, get VMWare server on a PC… get a tyan motherboard with a couple of dual cores and 4gb of ram. This way you have full access to instances without slowing down your workstation.
but seriously, all you need is RAM for 4 OSes. If you get 4gb and allocate 512mb for each, you will have 2gb left for the main OS which is pretty nice any way you slice it. I don’t imagine you will be running video encoding in each instance so they will end up idling in the background most of the time.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:07 pm
Asics adds this Comment:
I also used my laptop primarily some time. But it can’t simply beat out desktops. Now I have 3.2 GHZ, 4 GB Ram. 960 GB Hard Drive.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
apex adds this Comment:
I want to get a laptop very soon. I am going to get something simple. I agree that laptops have no performance gains over desktops, but you can never question the element of portability.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:15 am