I recently upgraded my 1st Gen Mac Pro to Leopard and with exception of the missing iLife I have found it to be quite agreeable. I bought the stock Mac Pro last September with 2 x 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeons and have since upgraded its RAM from 1GB to 3GB, this you would think, would be enough to achieve anything a multimedia student could require. I admit it does run premier pro and photoshop with no slow down what so ever, cinema 4D renders scenes that once took me hours, in minutes and most applications boot up in less than a second. It is also a nice reprieve to have the system boot up in less than twenty seconds but my biggest headache with the system is its performance when it comes to playing games. The stock NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT is now very old and if you look on google, can now be bought for around £20-40 a bit of an insult when you have gone and spent a great deal of money on a new system. However I am otherwise quite happy with it, it plays Doom III at 60fps and above with no noticeable slow down what so ever so why, when I attempt to play eve on-line under OSX does it slow down to between 13-40fps? This was the soul reason why I cancelled my eve subscription because when I dual boot into windows it runs at 80-155fps!
Over the summer I think I might buy apples NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT (1st Generation) Graphics Upgrade Kit for Mac Pro even though it is expensive at £170 it may finally allow me to play eve that, tiny bit faster. If else at least the system is future proofed for running games under Windows XP.
