I have received a proposal for the Dell Precision system I am getting from Dell as part of their program for Final Cut Pro editors who are considering switching to Adobe Premiere using a Dell/NVIDIA platform. I had assumed that I would be offered a T5500 ot T7500 Precision Tower based system, but the preliminary system options also included a mobile option: either a Precision M4600 or Precision M6600. I will immediately disqualify the M4600 because it has a 15.6″ screen, and having owned a 15″ Titanium G4 PowerBook, even with a second monitor, that screen size is just too small to edit on. My current system at RED  has a 24″ Samsung and a 27″ Viewsonic and I really like having all that screen real estate. The 17.3″ Dell Precision M6600 is intriguing as an option for its portability and hooked to a second monitor, it could work. It also comes with the NVIDIA Quadro 5010M which has 4GB GDDR5 and is a formidable card with 384 CUDA cores (thanks for the info Jonah).

However, I am really leaning toward the Precision T5500 Tower for its Dual Quad Xeons, 24 GB of ram and (if I can get it) a NVIDIA Quadro 4000 card .  The one negative of the configuration offered is only one screen, but hey they are giving me a lot of hardware and software so I can add a second monitor-which I would do immediately. I am used to the 2 monitor system and I wnat to be able to compare this system to what I currently use. They also suggested the Quadro 2000 card but I think I need a Quadro 4000 card. I will ask for that upgrade and see what they say…

Well I will sleep on this tonight and consider the feedback I have received from my colleagues and have a decision tomorrow (which is when they want to know anyway!)