Mac Pro & More

[ViRGE]

Oh, and where's Eug? He's the one that's supposed to be the field commander for these Mac threads.

 

[imported_Mags]

Originally posted by: gxsaurav
i just can't stop laughing at their price list & comparision

a 7300GT for workstation usage :rofl & then they compare it with a dell having a quadro which itself costs a lot more then $ 80 or 7300GT, & say Dell is costly

seriously, what are they targetting this machine at, Pro users, well, then adding a quadro raises the price to over $4000 easily

i m glad they didn't actully gave intel onboard graphics in this

Then configure the Mac Pro with a Quadro FX 4500 or Radeon X1900 XT and make a similar configuration for the dell. The Mac Pro REALLY is cheaper than a similar configured dell or HP, etc. Go to dell.com, configure a workstation with two 3 GHz "Woodcrest" XEONs and see for yourself.

 

[Childs]

Originally posted by: CU

Originally posted by: Childs

Originally posted by: CU

Originally posted by: mosco

Originally posted by: CU
Vista has already anouced their verions of Time Machine, so now who is photocoping Jobs. I wish they annouced new Desktops/Labtops based on Core 2. I was really looking forward to a new Mac Book Pro with a Core 2 chip. It also looks like the next version of OSX will not be out until Spring. Vista may beat them yet. Maybe!

Apple copying? You act like vista has already been released. its not like apple woke up this morning and decided they wanted to put in backups. this has probably been in the planning/coding stages for years.

But Leopard is not released yet either and Vista should, big should, be out first. And yes I know the backups stuff has probly been planned for a while on both sides, but Jobs was picking on MS pretty bad for photocopying, so I though it was funny when he annouced Time Machine. Also the backup system is already in Windows 2003 Server but only for system files.

Have you seen the demo of Time Machine? The backup concept has been around, but the UI is fairly unique.

Yes I have and it's just a WOW gimick. Like most of apples software Time Machine, Widgets, Spaces, Front Row, etc. it just uses some fancy animation to catch people and make it look new when it really isn't anything new. It is just being presented differently. If I could I would turn off all these animations just so everthing would happen faster instead of waiting on some animation to complete. It looks cool the first few times, but then it just gets old. I like new toys not my old ones rewrapped for me.

Yes, there is a WOW gimick, but then get past that and the "gimick" is a fairly useful UI. Also, in fooling around with the Leopard preview, there looks to be a daemon backupd, with does the archiving and restore, so I'm sure you could have it output file changes to a text file if that suits you. There is no man page yet, but you can see it spike when you do your backup. Unfortunately I have no real history to check the performance, but on an iMac I could see it being a problem after a few years of use. If you dont like the wow, then you could always open up a terminal and schedule incremental backups via cron.

Spaces works well, nothing needs to change. The Notes and Todo work well, although ToDo should allow the playing of a specific Itunes playlist or song. That Dashboard clip thing also works as advertised.

 

[Carlis]

So what about these RAM's? Is FB and ECC a significant improvement over regular stuff? Ore more important, is it even remotley worth those monney? As for the "extra heat sinks", you guys belive that will be useful?
Some one told me you must install rams in groups of four...

 

[zainali]

why do they compare with the MSRP of dell? when was the last time anytime paid MSRP for a dell machine?

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: Carlis
So what about these RAM's? Is FB and ECC a significant improvement over regular stuff? Ore more important, is it even remotley worth those monney? As for the "extra heat sinks", you guys belive that will be useful?
Some one told me you must install rams in groups of four...

Anand just put up a good article on the subject.

 

[0roo0roo]

yup anandtech article finally gives up some detail, pretty powerful stuff

 

[manly]

Looks like the chipset utilizes 4 memory channels. So although memory is installed in pairs, you're encouraged to have matched quads for optimal performance. I hope there's not much difference because memory prices are cost-prohibitive right now for 1GB FB-DIMMs, not to mention the default config is 2x512MB.

Edit:
Looks like Apple is trying to get customers to buy their overpriced memory:

Please note: Apple created a more robust thermal specification for the Mac Pro FB-DIMM heat sinks that provide more efficient cooling than many other FB-DIMMs. These FB-DIMMs require less airflow to stay cool and allow the internal fans to spin at slower speeds, improving system acoustics. FB-DIMMs made by other manufacturers that do not include a sufficient heat sink may cause the fans to run faster (and louder) or the memory chips to run slower so as not to overheat.

 

[imported_Lucifer]

I'm liking the Mac Pro, but it would be great if they released a system below the Mac Pro and above the iMac.

Maybe some people don't want to pay the price for a Mac Pro, but want a nice fully upgradeable machine, so an iMac or mac mini wouldn't cut it.

A new tower with a Conroe would be cool.

 

[manly]

The Ars review is up:

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macpro.ars

 

[manly]

Originally posted by: Carlis
So what about these RAM's? Is FB and ECC a significant improvement over regular stuff? Ore more important, is it even remotley worth those monney? As for the "extra heat sinks", you guys belive that will be useful?
Some one told me you must install rams in groups of four...

Apparently, the massive heat sinks do matter because Crucial's regular stuff isn't working:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/8/11/4954

 

[imported_Lucifer]

Barefeats benchmarks.

 

[manly]

Anand's review is up:

http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2816

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

I really want one.

 

[manly]

$100 price drop on the as-yet unshipped X1900 XT video card. If the RAM weren't so expensive, I might actually consider a Mac Pro. Realistically, I'd rather have a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro though.