Using Lightroom, I acquired 39 Nikon D200 Raw files (from the server) as TIFF and saved them to my local drive. It took 00:01:28. The raws were roughly 9mb each with lossless raw compression.

At the same time, I had 22 other applications open, including Photoshop and InDesign (and I was doing work in InDesign during the acquire).

If somebody wants to upload 25 or 50 files from one of the big chip Canons or Nikon D3, I’d be happy to benchmark.

I ordered my machine with the stock ATI graphics card, but I would upgrade to the next level nVidia if I had it to do over. Mostly because the ATI was bad and I spent two weeks screwing around with a machine that crashed all the time.

UPDATE: The ATI 2600XT video card in my replacement Mac Pro went bad after two weeks. I’ve ordered an nVidia 8800 which will hopefully show up today. Its not as much fun to run the Mac Pro remotely from a Powerbook.