a got an old weak dual core pc, small rokit5, no room modules, a few good padugins and synth (all sonalksis plugins, lots of sugar bytes, cyclop, sylenth, ohmforce, arts acoustic reverb, waves cla comps and puig tech suit, ni komplete7 and more), books, dvds dedicated to all topics of music production, akg 702 headphones, no outbourd
a got 1300€ budget…
- i now tend to buy an older 8core mac 3.1 or 4.1 pro via ebay. sometimes they are given away for far under 1000€.
- or makes it more sense to buy a good pair of nearfield monitors?
- or to get a good room treatment system?
- or a uad card?
i would avoid the mac pros… they dont give you that much bang for your buck at the minute… and buying old macs is dodgy ground imo.
new mac pros are due soon so old ones will drop further in price soon too.
You could upgrade your motherboard and chip for around $300 to an i5 3570k more than enough for decent sized projects… and if you really want to go mac you could try a hackintosh first see if you like it.
Im going to build one soon and give it a run through for Audio and see if it works well enough to use as a main system.
UAD is great the plugins are quite expensive. although its so close to the hardware its still good value. But you would need to be really craving a particular plugin from them that you just feel you cant live without.
You cant go wrong with a great set of speaker… they never go out of date they are totally key to a good mix and hold their value well.