P4/ M2

A client who works as a music producer has requested two systems, one 'powerhouse' and one laptop which he can connect to the internet and use at live shows. He also needs a external storage system to save backups and large files on.

Desktop- Mac pro 12 core £10,929.02

Two 2.66GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” (12 cores)

64 GB (8 x 8 GB)

Mac Pro RAID Card

512GB solid-state drive

2TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive

2TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive

None

ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB

Two 18x SuperDrives

Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel)

Apple LED Cinema Display (27" flat panel)

Magic Mouse

Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad (British) & User's Guide (English)

The extremely high power system allows the client to produce his music extremely efficiently, the 12 cores and 64GB of memory will be fully utilised by the music production software he intends to use. The raid card and dual 2TB hard drives will allow for a 2TB RAID 1 array which means his data is very safe should one drive fail. The SSD allows for the operating system along with software and key files to be saved and will drastically reduce the load times for his software, os as well as files
 A higher powered graphics card is simply not needed as this system will not be running any graphically intensive system so the HD5770 is more plenty. Two displays allows the client to run two different software suites at the same time without having to constantly switch between windows.

Laptop- MacBook Pro £3379

2.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7

8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM — 2x4GB

512GB Solid State Drive

SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)

MacBook Pro 17-inch Hi-Res Antiglare Widescreen Display

None

Backlit Keyboard (British) & User's Guide (English)

None

None

None

None

None

None

None

None

None

Promise Pegasus R4 4TB (4x1TB) RAID System

The anti glare screen will allow the client to use the laptop at his live shows in which many lights are involved which would possibly create glare on a normal screen. The keyboard is also Backlit which will be a great help when performing live when the stage is dark. The processor is power full enough that he could use audio editing software on it as well as multitasking.

The large expense can be justified by the features they offer, while you could substitute these two systems for cheaper ones, the reliability and ease of use of these two systems is worth the price alone, the tech support offered by apple is excellent so if any problems should arise they can be sorted out easily. The performance of the machines is perfect for the task at hand.
Since both systems and the storage option use the exact same operating system they will work perfectly together and you wouldn't have any concerns with incompatibility like you may with a linux or windows solution.