Mac Users; 2.5 or 2.9 GHz

[jyro]

Taking the plunge and selling my soul to Apple. There difference in cost for the sake of 0.4 GHz is almost £250. Is it worth it?! I'll be using it for playing out so I guess more power can only be a good thing

[outbound]

If you're workflow uses a lot of computing power and you want the most out of your system then do it.

If you are happy to resample and don't tend to use a lot of cpu intensive plugins then you may be happier to spend the money elsewhere.

May be worth checking out a couple of logic bench-test threads for an idea of what you can get out of your system

[Fat Person Torturer]

EDIT: Sorry didnt read the whole OP. 2.9 ghz is fine for playing shows (I use my 2.8 ghz for live). But if you're going to be producing I recommend you read this whole post.

I would go with the quadcore 2.3 ghz if that's an option for you.

I produce on the late 2011 2.8 ghz dual core and a early 2011 2.6 ghz quadcore. The dual core gets kind of sluggish around 30 tracks with about 10 of those resampled just to give you an idea. The 2.6 quadcore hasnt gotten sluggish for me ever and i've had projects with 70+ tracks, so i'm assuming a 2.3 could handle close to the same amount of work. These projects were in logic but I think running ableton uses less cpu and doesnt crash nearly as often. I've heard logic still crashes more than ableton even with 16 gb of ram.

The good thing is that logic is pretty reliable at recovering your data from a crash even if you made a lot of changes without saving. I've only lost 2 tracks ever since i've been using logic and that was without saving and then it crashed.

Sorry for the semi off topic post but I felt this is some information you should know before taking the plunge.