I need help picking the right pc or mac for film editing. My budget is about 2 grand. There is one on sale for craiglist that I think is a good deal can anyone shed some light on the computer. Im not to savy with tech talk so any advice helps.

http://washingtondc.craigslist.org/doc/sys/1672719743.html

I prefer a mac because I am more used to final cut but I am open to the right pc.

here are the specs on the computer

Model Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro1,1
Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors: 2
Total Number Of Cores: 4
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 12 GB
Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz

Do your applications benefit from GPU acceleration or not?
What architecture generation are those Xeons? Core 2 or Nehalem?
How many cores do your applications benefit from? 2, 3, 4, 6, 12 or more?

You're always going to get far more value from building a PC than buying a Mac.

Assuming you would benefit from four threads and won't use the GPU:

Intel Core i7 860 (4x2.80GHz) ($280); 4GB DDR3-1333 RAM ($100); $100 motherboard; $50 case and PSU; $50 Rade

If you'd benefit from more than four cores then consider a 2P Server (Dual Xeon (12 cores) for $1000 each or Dual Opteron (24 cores) for about $800 each) or wait until May for the 6-core desktop AMD CPUs at $200 - $300 each.

The main applications that I would be using is final cut and photoshop if I were to get a mac and adobe cs 4 if I were to get a PC. Im not real savy with the tech talk so I have no clue to answer your question.

If its for professional use get that Mac Pro.. Final cut pro is waaaaay better then anything out on the market on the PC.. and also: crashes happens more often on a PC then on the mac and when you are using it for work you don't want that.. With raw video files which take up a lot of GB you want to have as less crashes as possible.. if it's just for one project, get a PC..

OK it looks like the CPUs are Core 2 so any Nehalem or Magny-Cours Opteron would be a lot faster.

If you go with a PC, assuming you need $500 for the OS, peripherals, CS4 software and other stuff you don't get when you build that leaves $1000 for the components.

Therefore I don't want to spend upwards of $300 on the CPU. That rules out servers, so the i7 860 is it unless you're willing to wait for AMD's $300 6-cores to see how they compare.

CS4 benefits from GPU acceleration so a midrange GPU is a good idea. That's a weakness of the Mac Pro: the 7300GT will not accelerate Photoshop etc. much so you're better off with a PC.

AMD is better value but I'm not certain that Photoshop's acceleration works with AMD cards. So I'll temporarily recommend a $70 GT 240 from Nvidia.

$100 motherboard, $50 case and PSU, $30 optical drive, $200 for 8GB of RAM and $150 for hard-drives should do it. So it may come out under the $1000.

Plus points of this over the Mac are: much faster CPU and GPU acceleration. Downsides: you have to build it.

O.. before you decide.. I want to add thats if it's a career choice it's better to get the Mac because of FCP.. it still is the industry standard for video editing.. So if you go job searching/switching etc in that field it's good to work a lot with FCP..

Thanks soleron I appreciate it ill look into all that. I'm pretty sure I would be able to upgrade that 7300GT so I wasn't really worried about that but I didn't know much about the CPUs

I will prolly go over this guys house and test out his mac pro, he says its good for editing and all ready having photoshop and FCP is a big plus for me. Also bootcamp with windows 7 I have two macs now without bootcamp but I have been always interested in it, mostly for games though.