Gwenolye,

I purchased a Mac Pro about 6 months ago, and it is the finest PC I’ve ever owned (and I’ve had quite a few -- still have 2 quad-cores, and 2 dual cores for a render farm -- not to count the 3 laptops and older Dell P4s).

The base 8-core Mac Pro has 2, 4 core Xeon processors @ 2.8 GHz, for a total of 8 cores. Now here is the cool thing. I run Apple’s Bootcamp using Vista Business 64-bit. The reason for that, is because the Mac version of Vue 6I, (and I believe Vue 7I), is still 32-bit, whereas the PC version is 64-bit. Vue runs incredible under 64-bit, with 10 Gb of RAM. I also use Vista Business version, because the Home Premium version will not see both of the Mac processors. The Vista side of my Mac Pro renders Vue scenes about 20 to 25 % faster than Vue running on the Mac OS. I just wish e-on would issue a 64-bit Mac version of Vue -- I much prefer the Mac OS over Vista!

For the long term, I would go for the Mac Pro, assuming your budget can support it. That 8-core PC is probably the best PC value around. I went to HP and Dell to compare prices, and the Mac Pro was more than $1000 cheaper than the other PCs, and it is built with quality. One thing (as synergy543 stated), however, just purchase the basic machine from Apple, as their upgrade costs are very high. I purchased the Vista-side hard drive and memory (only comes with 2 Gb) from newegg.com. Adding the HD and memory is extremely easy.