0/10. I ain't even mad.
To begin with, Mac OS is the one that is actually decent.
Second, Adobe products do work better on Mac.
Third, more productive UI? In Windows? Really? Actual Adobe's UI is the same for both Mac and PC.
Finally, I fail to see where £12,000 is coming from - £3000 for a good Mac Pro and another £1000 for an aftermarket third party memory upgrade.
I also fail to see how on earth GTX590 is at all relevant to Photoshop or After Effects. GTX590 doesn't have 3GB or vRAM - it's 1.5GB per card, which is effectively only 1.5 Gb. And wait, vRAM has nothing to do with your need.
To sum up, it appears to me you don't quite know how your hardware works, what you need and why. For that reason going back to my original post - buy ECC ram and it will work in a non-ECC motherboard (I think, so double check that).
First, the UIs are only the same in the very latest CS5.5 and OSX Lion. The crappy Linux-style UI of Mac OS has always been extremely unappealing to me. It's all grey, no color choice. Sure, I save 10 vertical pixels with the menu being in the title bar but it also shrinks productivity when working with several open windows, ie, folders+editors+web-pages etc. I still don't use Alt-Tab that much so it's anti-productive not having a taskbar with the programs lined up.
Second, the Apple configurer doesn't give Nvidia as a GPU selection, thus I'm wasting MORE money on a Mac only ATI card just to spend thousands on a Mac-only Quadro card. Without a Quadro card, neither OS provides "better" performance.
Third, yes. Full-screen applications are more productive. I want to spend less time re-arranging a ton of separate, unlocked windows just to make the program visually suited to me when I could be spending that time actually working.
Finally, have you ever configured a fully featured Mac Pro? Sure it has two Xeons and costs £12K (4 SSDs, 2.93GHz Xeons, 64GB RAM, Display), but even the
single Xeon system costs over £4K (with similar hardware and specs to what I have), if I take the processor down to the 4 core it still costs £3.5.
To sum up, YOU obviously don't understand the Adobe Creative Suite and how it works with hardware. I currently have a 9500GT and I can assure you I saw a huge difference between physics and 3D based editing between this and the 9200, so tell me again how I don't know about how my hardware works. If you want a specific example of how a GPU is used, ROTOSCOPING. Quite an advanced feature, but if I try to render more than 30 seconds of 1920x1080 @ 23.976FPS with my 1GB card, it freezes and says it's out of VRAM.
DURR VIDEO EDITING APPS DON'T USE GRAPHICS PROCESSOR UNITS STOOPID LULZ.
</rant>
Nice trolling, btw. Nothing could be more obvious, just some guy coming into a thread and throwing a completely unreasonable opinion in there.
FYI, ECC only works in some non-ECC boards. A quick Google search just ruined your back-up defence.
What finally ruins your chances at trolling me is that I asked for non-ECC RAM. If you don't know, don't contribute. Your useless blabing has done nothing but waste server space and I unfortunately have to waste more explaining to you how it all works.
P.S.:
My big NO for Macs?
1: No decent x264 UIs. x264 if you don't know is the best video compressor on the planet. With no decent UIs for configuring it on a Mac, it makes compressing videos in a decent quality AND a small file size difficult.
2: I've developed a 99% lossless x264 profile which also compresses video to extremely small sizes. I spent 6 months researching the x264 codec in order to develop this profile, and two months to test and tweak.
3: I'm developing a Windows only x264+FLAC+MP3+OGG+Subtitle UI which uses my profile to compress videos. It will eventually be coded as a plug-in for Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro.
There is no way I'm going to trade all that just for an overpriced slab of aluminium.
