InfiniteMac OSx86 - View Single Post - What is a good setup to run Final Cut Pro?

naquaada · 04-25-2009, 11:50 PM

There are difference setups possible: The one with minimum requirements or one which working is fun. But these are more expensive.

I think today is an Intel setups better, they're coming closer to real Macs than AMD machines. But I'm also using an Socket 939 AMD processors and they're working perfectly. In the actual Macs are nVidia cards, the Mac Pro's will soon get the ATI Radeon HD4870 or HD4870 X2. These things are monstrous fast, but are getting very hot and need up to 300W power. I'm using an ATI Radeon HD2600XT, it costs between 20-50 Euro on ebay and needs only 50W. It supports Dual-Monitor up to 2048x1536 and TV-Out. There are various passive versions out there, so they have no loud fan.

If you want to use Maya and Final Cut you need large fast harddisks (I can recommend the Samsung HD103UJ, it's very fast, quiet and stays cool) and a lot of RAM. You also will need high-resolution monitors, if you want to use HDTV 1080p resolutions you need one or two with 1920x1080 resolution. The HD2600XT is able to display these modes. And of course you need a fast cpu and a lot of RAM.

If you want to do it absolutely professional you need a low-latency audio device. Onboard soundcards are often bad in quality and have possibly a fixed sampling rate of 48 kHz. I'm using professional M-Audio cards. There's the USB Transit card which supports recording and playback up to 96 kHz, S/PDIF in and out and an optical AC-3 output. A little bigger is the M-Audio ProFire 610. This thing has 6 inputs and 10 outputs (two channels each are coaxial S/PDIF) and is supports sampling rates up to 192 kHz, that's high definition audio quality. The thing has 8 fully independent analogue outputs, so you can route the ouputs manually to a 7.1 surround sound set. Both audio devices are coming with special Mac drivers, especially the ProFire has very complex routing settings. The ProFire 610 also has a MIDI interface and an inbuilt 2-channel microphone amplifier with optional 48V phantom power.

These would be my tips for additional things, but I can't tell you anything about an Intel/nVidia mainboard setup, I'm an AMD/ATI-only geek.

Another method would be to search for a suitable laptop which has one or more eSATA ports so you can connect fast external harddisks. But the laptops gfx cards are often worse and it's more difficult to find drivers for it.