Possibility of 3.2Ghz Nehalem Mac Pro?

Doubtful, at least this year. Past trends in Apple hardware releases have shown that they refresh their desktop machines about once per year. Sometimes, it takes longer than that. The Early 2008 Mac Pro had a January 2008 release; the Early 2009 model got released in March of this year. So, I don't see a replacement coming for at least 7-8 months.

If you need a Mac Pro and have the money, buy now. Waiting for the next big thing in computing is like waiting for the next model year car just because it's rumored to have a slight increase in HP output. Technology inevitably improves and there's no controlling that.

They should, they could, but most likely won't. I'm guessing thay have design specs/principles and the 3.2 will most likely run too hot for their liking.

you can purchase the base 2.26 and upgrade it on your own, sell the original chips to offset the new.

It would likely be a better idea to upgrade other areas of the system for an overall system boost than swap out the originals for 3.2GHz parts.

HDD throughput can be significantly improved, and would give a better performance IMO. Especially if a RAID is used. Data is fed to the processor(s) faster, so there's less time spent waiting, resulting in faster executions.

nanofrog said:

It would likely be a better idea to upgrade other areas of the system for an overall system boost than swap out the originals for 3.2GHz parts.

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just sayin!

I doubt they will upgrade. Even if they do 2.93GHZ Quad or Octo should be plenty fast enough for a few good years.

A simple search will produce that this topic has been beaten to death thoroughly on this forum. To recap:

No 3.2 Ghz Mac Pros because, (1) the 2.26 is 80W, the 2.66 + 2.93 are both 95W and the 3.2 is 130W. Hence, the 3.2 doesn't fit Apple's "green" kick. (2) the 3.4 Harpertown was never offered--Apple topped off with the 3.2. (3) If they were going to use the 3.2, they would have done so already--they were the first to get the Nehalem chips and could pick which ones they wanted. (4) if you think the 8 x 2.93 is expensive, forget the 3.2.

frimple said:

just sayin!

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I was just thinking in terms of best bang-for-your-buck.

Unfortunately, as DeepCobalt mentioned, if the 3.2GHz part were offered, the price would be really high, and may not sell that well.

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So basically you have the fastest Mac Pro on the planet! Very kewl!

Tesselator said:

So basically you have the fastest Mac Pro on the planet! Very kewl!

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Agreed. That is a very nice setup. Octo 3.2 GHz, Radeon HD 4890 and 32 GBs of RAM...

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That looks like a nice System Tutor.

How much did you pay for your CPUs (Intel Xeon UP W3570)?

Cynicalone said:

I doubt they will upgrade. Even if they do 2.93GHZ Quad or Octo should be plenty fast enough for a few good years.

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You should be banned from the Mac Pro forum for that comment.

People with the 2.93GHz Mac Pro's (or non-base) want/need as fast as is possible. e.g. in my case, if I had a 3.2GHz Pro, i would be able to get renders done at 14% higher resolution in the same time...and that's just better...or i could get them done in 12.5% shorter time...and that's also just better...why not have better?

/rant



@Tutor

may i ask what you do with that beast?

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Tutor said:

If you believe http://browse.geekbench.ca/ highest scores, there is one faster Linux with Intel Xeon X7460's @ 2.66 GHz (24 cores) and an IBM with Intel Xeon X7460's @ 2.67 GHz (32 cores); but its the fastest Mac listed.

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Of course I don't believe GeekBench scores. My own machine varies over twelve hundred points just depending on the phase of the moon. So if you want the highest GeekBench scores just run it at various with the fans on max. You'll get it eventually.

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There is an upcoming article at AnandTech in their review of the MacPro that will cover CPU upgrades.

anandtech said:

It's a Mac Sort of Week

I'm out of the office for the rest of this week but I'm working on wrapping up two major projects: the 3GS review and my Nehalem Mac Pro article. The latter is pretty unique since we managed to upgrade the CPUs in the Mac Pro, which proved to be much more complicated than you'd think at first.

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What I am hoping for is this:

Hot on the heels of the radical reorg and price shift of the laptop lineup, I'm hoping that that Mac Pro lineup gets a reorg featuring spec bumps and price drops. I can't spend $3300 on a 2.26 machine that needs expensive video card upgrades out of the box.

I'm hoping to see the 2.66 at the $3300 price point or something like that and they could use Snow Leopard as the reason.

New OS and a refreshed lineup. Do it!~

DeepCobalt said:

No 3.2 Ghz Mac Pros because, (1) the 2.26 is 80W, the 2.66 + 2.93 are both 95W and the 3.2 is 130W. Hence, the 3.2 doesn't fit Apple's "green" kick.

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Any issues with taking a 2.26 machine and stuffing 90W or 130W processors in there?

snouter said:

Any issues with taking a 2.26 machine and stuffing 90W or 130W processors in there?

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Someone here ripped the heat sinks off an Octo core machine and it revealed that the octo processors (unlike the quads) run naked without IHS (integrated heat spreaders). Since all retail processors are sold with IHS, and they are soldered on, it's impractical to upgrade the processors on an Octo.

snouter said:

Any issues with taking a 2.26 machine and stuffing 90W or 130W processors in there?

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Someone here ripped the heat sinks off a dual processor machine and it revealed that the CPU's in the Octo's (unlike the quads) run naked without IHS (integrated heat spreaders). Since all retail processors are sold with IHS, and they are soldered on, it's impractical to upgrade the processors on an Octo.

snouter said:

Any issues with taking a 2.26 machine and stuffing 90W or 130W processors in there?

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read the thread again (with particular reference to Tutor's posts)

Tutor said:

To Mr. Khan,

The beast is used to help me create management training videos and other training media.

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so F.C.P. and stuff? you must be doing pretty well

congrats on having (quite possibly) the fastest Mac Pro in the world

Genghis Khan said:

read the thread again (with particular reference to Tutor's posts)

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There's no reference to the TDP issue in any of his posts

EDIT: and then I read the post that references that they run much cooler now and have heat spreaders