I am preparing to move to version 7. Presently the machine I am using to serve is G4 766. Will this be fast enough, should I get a G5, do I need a DP 2.5 or would a dual processor 1.8 be sufficient?

Solution consists of two files, one with almost 20 tables and 200,000 records. The other has about 10 gbyte of images (scanned material).

More important than the processor speed is the memory you have and the amount of free disk space (that will be used as virtual memory).

The G5 will certainly perform better than the G4...

What about between a server or not. A 2.5 GHz desktop DP is $3,000 and a 2 GHz DP server is 4,000. I cannot see any good reason to spend the extra money except to save some space.

I was faced with the same decision of whether to purchase a desktop machine or xServe to run FMP 7 Server Advanced. I was able to configure a PowerMac 1.8 GHZ G5/Dual Processor with Mac OS Server (10 Client Limit) for about $2400.00. I couldn't see the benefit of a dual G5 xServe for about $1600.00 more. With some of the difference I purchased 2 GB's of RAM and a Western Digital Raptor Serial ATA hard drive (10,000RPM). I'll probably replace the existing hard drive with another Raptor drive and add AppleCare. It's still substatially less than the Dual xServe. The machine supposedly shipped so I'll post some performance observations after I set it up.