Best OS and Hardware Config

[reagandennis]

Whats the Best OS for Magic,
I am planning to build a customised work station for magic,
what Should be the Ideal OS and Hardware config
can i run a 3 Hour show on a single playlist with Midi Control,
My Current 13" mac is lagging with one 5 min song.
Any suggestions would be highly appretiated

[Magic]

Good question. Do you have a specific budget in mind? Usually, a PC will get you a better bang-for-the-buck.

Try to get the best graphics card you can afford. You can get an NVidia GTX 970 for around $300 USD.

If you are playing a lot of video files, a fast hard drive (SSD) is a good investment. The speed increase is really significant.

As far as OS's go, personally I still like Windows 7 the best. It seems to get the highest frame rates.

can i run a 3 Hour show on a single playlist with Midi Control,

Yes . That shouldn't be a problem.

[blackdot]

in terms of price and flexibility windows is the better choice than apple.

i would also recommend an ssd, a decent amount of ram (8 to 16gb) and a good graphics card. gtx 970 is a good choice, but nvidia is already bringing out the nexr generation of gpus, 1070 and 1080, so if youre willing to wait for those youll get quite more performance for about the same price (300-400usd). or, assuming that then the 9xx cards will drop in price, you could save money on those.

i'm currently not up to date on amd cards but they tend to have more vram than their nvidia counterparts, which is nice.

a decent cpu is cool and important, but i have a 4 year old one and it still works fine so i think youll do with a 150-250usd cpu. i may stand corrected on this but i think the cpus didnt increase much in power anyway (even more so compared to whats happening with gpus) and the gpu is much more important for magic anyway.


a good benchmark site for cpus as well as gpus is anandtech.

cheers

[dj0le]

Like any electronics, the only way for you to answer your question is to start with how much you want to spend. Then build out or buy the machine with the best specs you can for that price. Just make sure you get SSD hard drives and an Nvidia GPU. Everything else is secondary to those 2 items.

Also, although I am a huge fan of Mac and prefer it over Windows based environments, in the last 2 years they have started to lag way behind the market in terms of graphics card availability so I would just go with Windows. However, if you want a Mac solution, you need to wait a few more months until the new Nvidia chips are available on the Pro models (not confirmed but assumed).

Finally, here's the laptop I'm using and it can handle Magic plus a bunch of other visual & projection mapping programs running @ 60 fps for as many hours as you want. Anything you buy that has similar specs should be fine for what you want to do.

http://mysn.co.uk/xmg-p506-gaminglaptop

[reagandennis]

Thank you guys..