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Mac Pro Unboxing Photos, Early Benchmarks and Notes
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Now look at this picture:
What does that show you? Isn't it obvious that this is a 2.5" drive in a 3.5" enclosure? Come on. The gap at the right is just a void.
For that machine, you shouldn't attempt to save money buy getting other people's used SSD. Get a decent SSD, brand new and whatever storage you need. Personally, I'd be happy with a 64GB one for the OS and I'd use 7200rpm HDDs for the data, media files, home folders, etc. There is no practical reason to use SSD for data files, if their regular use will increase degradation of the drive that runs the OS and applications.
If i ever win the lottery i will buy one of these just for gaming. Waste of money (just for gaming) or not
If I won the lottery (with a decent winnings), I wouldn't even care about specs. And I wouldn't play a single game from thereon, I hope. There is more to life than gaming, especially if you are loaded. I'd move to sexual games and deviances. And I'd probably play with my business and my money. Maybe, when I wasted my millions, I'd buy a Mac Pro and a copy of Warcraft or whatever that game is and start wasting my life that way.
EDIT: please merge, accidental consecutive posting.
Yo!!! a (real) Mac makes it onto the Mac Rumors homepage! Take note Apple with a machine this cute you might wanna take some snaps of your own and stick it on your website Gonna order one as soon as the client cheques clear!!!
Gonna order one as soon as the client cheques clear!!!
... which can be exchanged on a Mac Pro, but not on an iMac!
... and Blizzard. With Valve's "Steam" you get quite some game selection already - others will probably follow, as the Mac continues to gain market share (and the drivers improve - Valve is blazing the trail here).
Might be the better deal for you, but not necessarily for everyone!
With a Mac Pro you can easily add better graphic later - the iMac has to be replaced every 2 years or so in order to get up-to-date graphics (and more modern ports and other technology btw.). My 2006 Mac Pro runs on a still decent 4870 (and the 5870 is already running in some other Mac Pro's) - the 2006 iMac offers a (comparably pathetic) Radeon X1600 and is not upgradeable in that department.
You also have far less clutter on your desk: With an iMac, you probably will need to add external harddrive boxes sooner or later, which not only add clutter, but also do cost quite a buck (e.g. a drobo FS as GB-Lan NAS is around 600,- w/o harddrives). With a Mac Pro you can add 4x 3,5" harddrives PLUS you have two 5,25" bays with at least one to spare, so you could e.g. add a special frame there for additional 4x 2,5" harddrives. All still be powered by the one Mac Pro PSU, whereas external solutions for the iMac do require (external) Plug-in-PSU's, one per external box - yet more clutter, more wasted energy.
Or you can easily add any aftermarket SSD to the Mac Pro (i.e. the one that fits your personal ratio for capacity to money best) in any of the harddrive bays in the Mac Pro - there are lots of adapters for putting one or two 2,5" drives into one 3,5" bay.
On an iMac you better ordered the (expensive!) SSD option from Apple, as you would need to remove the display on the machine, if you'd wanted to add it afterwards, running high risk to get dust into the display while doing so. And even then you would have to use a kludge (like removing the optical drive or replacing the factory-installed harddrive), as there is no dedicated bay for the SSD.
And because you may need to add a SATA controller for additional SATA ports after adding more and more drives to the Mac Pro, you can easily do so by simply putting a SATA card into one of the Mac Pro's PCIe slots. The same way you can also easily add eSata and USB3 to the Mac Pro if you feel the need to do so - Apple won't built you such an iMac at all! Your best bet on the iMac would be external adapters, which not only add yet more clutter, but also don't offer the speed of "native" ports (considering PCIe-based solutions as "native" here as well).
Also noisewise the Mac Pro is one of the quietest computers out there, in relation to its capabilities. Granted - it may be louder than the iMac in direct comparison. But on an absolute scale it still is unobtrusive and really whisperquiet when put under the desk. And as soon as the iMac out-of-the-box is not sufficient anymore (e.g. HD too small => need for external HD space), things may start to change even more.
So in my opinion there are quite some reasons that make the Mac Pro the better deal compared to an iMac, even with games in mind. The 2006 Mac Pro had a fantastic price/capabilities/performance ratio (even more so as refurb), which Apple realized and thus upped the price to come closer to the "usual price point" of the competition in that market.
Unfortunately this also opens the gap between iMac and the often demanded "headless Mac" even more!
Imagine a shrunk Mac Pro still with room for expansion (2,5" instead of 3,5" drive bays or two 3,5" bays with the option to put two 2,5" drives in each of that bays, 2-3 PCIe slots, user-changeable graphic card etc.) and less expensive components (e.g. desktop class CPU's instead of server-class), while still maintaining the quality and internal clean structure of the Big Box Mac Pro. Due to the restrictions (less HD bays and PCIe slots than the Mac Pro, "only" desktop-class components) it would not bite too much into the Mac Pro's sales numbers, but instead allow Apple to sell additional units (people who don't want the iMac for the reasons i described above, but can't afford or justify the expenses for a fully blown server-class workstation).
People often state that Mac users would not be the DIY type - but "internal expansion" is also about avoiding clutter (something Apple aggressively advertised with the iMac) and expanding slowly over time, as money allows, technology advances and requirements demand: One of the key success factors of the first successful Mac - the Mac ][ - was the presence of expansion slots!
And it's about prolonging computer lifetime - an iMac is quite obsolete after some 3 years, while a big box MacPro will easily live twice the time. So the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) might not be worse (if not better) for a Mac Pro over an iMac...
Or maybe I'd drink myself to death and install a 500GB SSD down my throat or up my ***.
Because a lot of users have no use for a powerful GPU. The 5770 is a step up from what Apple have offered previously in terms of what is available at the time, and that which other workstations are available with.
The ideal situation would be a cheaper Mac Pro, not the same cost with a more expensive card. There isn't anywhere for them to go up either, 5970 is out of the question because of the work required to make a dual GPU card work in OS X.
The mac pro is one thing I would never buy from apple.
Considering I can (and just have) build a 'super' computer for that price I really see no reason to ever get this.
Considering I can (and just have) build a 'super' computer for that price I really see no reason to ever get this.
its an awesome machine
but you can simple build a hackintosh for much less
mine cost me $1200
i7 running at 3.8GHZ
4GB DDr3
120GB SSD Drive
2 x 2TB SATA Drives
ATi 5770
works perfectly.
got info from
http://www.tonymacx86.com/
but you can simple build a hackintosh for much less
mine cost me $1200
i7 running at 3.8GHZ
4GB DDr3
120GB SSD Drive
2 x 2TB SATA Drives
ATi 5770
works perfectly.
got info from
http://www.tonymacx86.com/
OS X is an excellent platform for scientific computing - e.g., MATLAB, Mathematica, Stata, and R. These programs benefit from the extra cores and memory of the Pro.
But does it blend???
actually my burning question is drop the 5870 in an early 2008 mac pro and see if it works.
actually my burning question is drop the 5870 in an early 2008 mac pro and see if it works.
An i7 is not a XEON.
Look, I'm glad you're happy with your computer. That's great. But I hate these "I can build something different for a different price" posts.
Yes, that is the way things work, but it doesn't really mean anything.
Ram
The 64GB max RAM is a huge boon. It would be awesome for the scientific visualizations we do in my neuroimaging lab. Unfortunately the cost is a bit of a barrier. 64GB of RAM for $2850 + a $5000 computer (or even $3500) + a nice monitor is getting pricey. It'd be awesome though.
The 64GB max RAM is a huge boon. It would be awesome for the scientific visualizations we do in my neuroimaging lab. Unfortunately the cost is a bit of a barrier. 64GB of RAM for $2850 + a $5000 computer (or even $3500) + a nice monitor is getting pricey. It'd be awesome though.
Even then, you should want a backup, which a hard disc is pretty good for, at least for consumers, pros might use tape or some form of optical. Even assuming you have enough battery to outlast any outage you ever get, you often can't fix corrupted files if you don't have a backup. Files might be corrupted by mistake or a software bug, a bit flip from radioactive decay or cosmic rays. At least a Mac Pro has ECC, but that's only for RAM, not long term storage, it won't survive a reboot.
I read this and say, who the heck rated this as negative? Maybe one of those trolls out there
Seriously, are they thinking that it's a bad thing that pictures of the Mac Pro was released? Really.
The two problems I have with the rating system is, first, we don't know why the negative, or the positive for that matter. It could be about the message, the writing, whatever. Second, where the heck is that control to post a negative or positive?
It's possible to tuck the SSD away somewhere, maybe they felt it wasn't worth doing. The little adapter shell looks pretty nifty though.
Drobo isn't comparable to what's offered in a stock Mac Pro. Drobo can recover from a drive failure, and disk management can be no maintenance outside of just sliding a new drive in, standard RAIDs often require more than that. To get anything close built-in, you need Apple's $700 RAID card.
no its not a xeon. but really is it any different.? that anyone would notice.
i use Mac Pros with Xeons at work and my i7 machine at home.. my home machine is faster.. having a Xeon doesnt mean anything. they both compute the same data.. at the same speed.
why do you hate the idea of people building a comparable machine for less?
whats wrong with having options
Hackintosh is tempting but the questionable future is off putting. I don't want to have to worry that if download a software update my machine is no longer going to be stable. Yes, 10.6 works, but what about 10.7? I can be sure that will run on a Mac I buy today.
I did the whole 'build my PC' thing. I got over it...it was one of the reasons I went Apple in the first place.
I did the whole 'build my PC' thing. I got over it...it was one of the reasons I went Apple in the first place.
I love that as well! Switching an internal hard drive takes hardly 30 seconds longer than switching an external FW drive
The minute I opened my 2008 model, I no longer found its price too steep.
Options are great. I love posts that say "I compromised here, got something less, saved a lot of money, and it still does what I need it to."
That's fair and honest. What I don't like are posts implying that there aren't compromises and that something is simply cheaper for no reason at all. That's not an honest way of describing it. It's very car-salesman-ey and it leaves people confused over why some things cost more than other things.
I strongly believe that MacRumors should be educating people, not confusing them.