After 512 days without updates, the new Mac Pros are finally on their way to creative professionals. While I'm hacking my way DIY-style to a better editing machine, those of you with a need to edit in front of clients will be requiring a legit machine from Apple. Of course, that doesn't mean you're not also interested in saving some money, so here are some deals and savings to be had -- and some benchmarks to ponder.
The best prices I could find are at MacMall, which sells the base models at discounts of $100 to $200 off of Apple's own pricing (plus, they bundle a number of free extras):
$2,398 
If you're going to be paying good money for one of these machines, however, you're probably wondering how it performs. So here are two benchmark articles from Bare Feats and Mac Performance Guide, who agree that the 6-core 3.33GHz model offers the most bang for the buck (it finishes third in the results, but at $3,700 it is a whole lot less money than the $8,500 first place machine):
Of course, you can also expect me to run these same benchmarks on the machine on which I'm writing this post, which seems to be suffering from some sort of identity crisis -- it looks like a PC, but it thinks it's a Mac. And it's a fast one at that...
