Ordered New 8 Core Today ... is it worth it?

I bought my first Mac in San Diego in 1984. It was the original 128K Mac. I was in the Navy at the time, and I set my beloved machine up in the Harpoon Missle Launch Room, a space no bigger than a walk-in closet, on the USS Elliot (a Spruance Class Destroyer stationed at the 32nd Street Naval Station near downtown SD). My Mac went with me on all of the Elliot's deployments ... including (2) WESPACs ... into the farthest reaches of the Pacific Ocean. Like me, My 128K Mac became a "golden shellback" when we crossed the equator at the 180th meridian after returning to SD from Australia (this is the domain of the Golden Dragon, ruler of the 180th meridian, for all of you slimy wogs).
Fast forwarding to 2007, I ordered my 10th Mac today (MAC X). A 3.0 GHz 8 core machine with 1GB of RAM (which I've already upgraded with a matched quad to 5GB thanks to RamJet ... a good start considering the fact that this system drained my bank account), a 500GB start-up drive (with two 750GB Seagate Barracudas that I plan to turn into a 1.5TB RAID 0 thanks to ZipZoomFly), an ATI Radeon X1900 XT video card, two 16X SuperDrives, Airport Extreme, Bluetooth, etc ...
X Macs & 23 years later ...
From a 128K Mac to this new octocrazy X-gen wonder ... I feel a bit nostalgic and perhaps a little gasp old tonight ...
Of course when the machine finally arrives, all of that will change.
So tell me you octo-monkeys with your new machines, is this going to be worth it?
500 MHz DP G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   My Mac is old, need a new one!
500 MHz DP G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   My Mac is old, need a new one!
500 MHz DP G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   My Mac is old, need a new one!
500 MHz DP G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   My Mac is old, need a new one!

My new 8 core shipped out of Shenzehn China on Wednesday. By Thursday night it was in Anchorage. It arrived at my home the next morning.
The machine arrived in perfect working order with everything I ordered in tact. As usual, Apple met my high expectations.
The migration from my G4 went smooth, only a few minor hiccups. I used Apple's Migration Assistant with firewire and put my G4 in target disk mode. I've seen some horror stories in these forums, but I experienced no pain.
I installed (2) 750GB drives and configured them as a RAID 0. This was a snap. The drives install easily in the Mac Pro's well designed enclosure. No power cords and no data cords! What a great design.
I also installed an additional 4GB of RAM. This was a breeze too. As a design engineer, I'm impressed. My hat is off to the engineers who worked on this.
The wireless keyboard & mouse sync'd up easily with the Mac. I also tested my new Motorola KRAZR over blue tooth ... no problem. Apple's website says iSync is compatible with RAZR & KRAZR phones, but that's not the case. I am unable to use iSync (I suspect this will be fixed soon).
I downloaded and ran Bootcamp this afternoon. It was easy. I loaded my Mac Pro with Windows XP Pro, and only ran into one problem. The ATI driver sought out by Bootcamp seemed to be incompatible with my X1900. I found a solution on these boards however, and resolved the driver problem in a bout an hour ... not a big deal ... all things considered.
There is one thing I found out about Bootcamp today that I hadn't heard here before. Windows doesn't recognize my wireless keyboard and mouse. I'm not sure if there is a workaround for this yet, but I suspect not. This will probably be resolved in the official release of Bootcamp when Leopard comes out in October. Until then, I guess I'm stuck with an extra USB keyboard and mouse on my desktop ...
I haven't tried to load Pro-Engineer yet ... that will be the ultimate test for me.
Tiger runs awesome of course. I transcoded a movie from DVD-9 format to DVD-5 format to see how the octo would perform. Normally this took about an hour on my G4. The 8 core Mac Pro chewed thru in in less than two minutes.
All in all, I'm very pleased thus far. I'm liking this new toy a lot. I think it might be worth it ... I copy that on the Ferrari David!

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