Mountain Lion 10.8.2. I am not afraid of running the latest version. Just check Avid's site to make sure. I usually wait 4-6 months before stepping up to the next major version.
Not afraid either, but when it comes to the overall system performance, i tend to be demanding. And although i bought Lion when it went out (at 1st tested on my home iMac 27, eventually went up to 10.7.4), i was more than deceived by its overall performance compared to SL (10.6.8). I had the impression that with Lion, Apple wanted to satisfy mostly the genaral public and not the pros. Seemed like a fat lazy lion to me, resting under a tree (its name is brilliant
), found workflow was less efficient, and all the GUI gizmos / supposed enhancements as well as iCloud basically useless on a work-only machine. And on top of that, it turned out that PT (had to wait for HD 9.0.5 mandatory update for Lion to install 10.7.4 on my MacPro) had suffered an obvious loss of efficiency in the process, even becoming unstable sometimes, so i eventually went back to SL, and everything went rock solid & fast again. Haven't tried ML yet though, but i sincerely do hope it's not as miserable as Lion.
Actually, as i own an PTHD license, upgrading to PTHD10, if we set aside the financial aspect, wouldn't help me a lot as it's not yet certified for ML (though i think regular PT10 is), and anyway my MacPro (1,1) won't run on ML if i understood well, only MacPro3,1 and up are allowed. This is also why i'm considering a Hackinsoth move !
I am also running the latest PT 10.3. Remember 64 bit is around the corner and this is a game changer. Right now PT will only have 3 Gigs of RAM available natively because it is still 32 bit. This is one of the reasons why you can buy a Mac Pro, but never really touch on its true power. HD rigs have RAM Disk Cache and their own processing cards to get around this.
To have access to all your RAM you need 64 bit which is supposedly going to be in PT 11. This will get everyone one step closer to a PT HD rig. Putting all your virtual instruments on a SSD will also make an improvement. You want to try to run your sessions almost entirely in RAM if you can.
So...you need 64 bit to access all of your RAM then you need a Thunderbolt interface to get your latency down to less than 2ms. That is when you start competing with a HD rig that would run you between $5000.00 - $9000.00.
Thunderbolt is the other game changer. Firewire and USB have terrible latency. These are basically consumer grade interfaces for entry level recording. The first time you run a session at 64 samples you start to understand the importance of this....
Yes, i'm aware of all this. I've recently been mixing on a brand new monster BTO MacPro 12 core 3.06 with 64GB ram, all SSD (there was a 940GB SSD inside for sessions !), the latest PT10HDX system (with the RAM disk cache of course). Incredible power, believe me i've seen the difference, never seen that before... Oooh how i wish this ($20k+) system was mine ! But Mr Taxman did beat me a lot this year (yet another reason for the Hackintosh move !). He beat me so well, that before next summer i'll have to be very cautious with my accounting. That means also that i'll have to make choices, and a wise one is for me to upgrade to PTHD10 first ! Then gather the bits and pieces for my dream hack ! UAD Apollo will come last on the list (next summer i guess), although i'm also considering an Apogee Symphony PCIe based system (less than 2ms latency as well). So in the mean time, my faithful Digi002R (a modified one) will have to be up and running !
Ah ! I can't wait to hear about how yours will perform...
Now that's cool ! And you're going with the Intel Z77RE-75K board ? What version of OSX will you be running ? What version of PT do you use ? I read somewhere in this thread that you wanted to use an UAD Apollo, do you already have it ?
. I could not figure out how to use Kextbeast so I downloaded Kextdrop (
.