YEARRGHGHH - Mac Pro at home, and I'm stuck at work

After debating, racking my mind, and looking at my bank balance in gloom (it's all good now the Mac's here ) I picked up my first Mac yesterday evening from my local Apple Store: A Mac Pro with 2x 2.66Ghz CPUs, an X1900XT graphics card and bluetooth+WiFi goodness.

They were finishing building it after the store had closed, so my family and I had the entire Apple store to ourselves. My sisters and mum found the distortion effects in Photo Booth hilarious enough to occupy them for an hour (if you have iSight get that application, it's so much fun).

Anyways, didn't have time to do more than power it on and install updates before having to power it off for bed. Now at work, I'm finding it hard to concentrate...I thought Macs were supposed to make you more productive!!!!

Heheh, it's a small startup and I'm the only one in the office today. I suppose I could head home anytime but a sense of duty and dogged determination keeps me locked to my desk. I'll post pics as soon as I get home, and check if Apple are still messing up the bluetooth wiring on Mac Pros.

I could never bring any nice hardware from home to here. Even my pens get pinched by my co-workers! Someone at home just messaged me to say '(your mac smells a bit-- Millie said it smells like ozone, but it smells like a skunk sprayed in the room to me!)'

Is this that new Mac smell some other forum members are worrying about?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/297878/

Well, it's been a long weekend of family barbecues and nice summer weather, but in between my barbecuing commitments I did get time to spend with my new 'friend'

My first impressions are favourable (of course), everything's smooth, flawless, the Mac Pro connecting up with my two dell displays via DVI just fine (using the X1900XT, not the 7300GT). I installed boot camp on the machine to try it out, before I install everything on the Mac and use it as my main desktop.

The first thing I tried was syncing the device with my Sony Ericsson phone via bluetooth. Using iSync this took less than three minutes in total to figure out how to sync my phone (used help), pair the Mac and the Sony and then complete the sync. The bluetooth had a good range and synced all 300+ of my contacts from 30 feet away (I ran round the house while it was doing it to test its range). Peeking at the bluetooth module in the Mac showed that cables 1 and 2 were connected to the Airport module and a third unlabelled cable was connected to the Bluetooth module. I could not ascertain any other wires, the connectors to the cards looked too fragile to fiddle with.

In addition that new, slightly sweetish smell has dissipated completely, and I could not find any 'plastic' coating the machine's internals as some other people mentioned.

Running Windows XP with the 7300GT and the X1900XT caused problems with XP failing to start, so I took out the 7300GT and found to my delight that it worked in my main development PC (standard X86 Windows/Linux box) which was up until now using the onboard Intel graphics. I can run Linux at my flat panel's native resolution

I'm assuming whatever bios Apple put on their graphics cards allows it to run on both EFI and non-EFI platforms.

The Mac Pro played Prey, Doom 3, Quake 4 under OSX quite well, apart from some vertical tearing due to a lack of VSync with the X1900XT under OSX. Under Windows XP: Command and Conquer 3, Supreme Commander and Dawn of War ran flawlessly at 1920x1200. I'm impressed with just how fast this graphics card is.

I read of numerous problems on the Apple site which people were experiencing with the X1900XT and games under OSX and Windows XP. Artifacting, overheating, etc. I ran a few ATI graphics demos for several hours without any 3D glitches or the card shutting down. The graphics card however is noisy when doing anything intensive and blows out a lot of heat (I should add that it is very quiet at all other times - like when the Mac is off! ).

The mouse isn't much for games, right clicking being awkward at best, fortunately Microsoft make a perfectly nice optical mouse for $8 which is white, so I'm using that now. I'm keeping the Mighty Mouse connected as I'm sure Apple had some reason to sell this 'bar of soap'-like mouse with every one of their Macs! It might grow on me...

I'd put some Mac Pr0n of my machine up, but there are a lot of pictures of other people's Mac Pros, so I'll save us all some bandwidth! One issue I did note was that the included Apple ATI drivers did not work with boot camp and I had to resort to downloading them from ATI instead. Also, on every other boot into Windows XP I noticed an odd screen corruption at startup.





I've run driver clean and reinstalled the drivers and so far so good (touch wood). I've not seen the problem in OSX (yet), if anyone has any thoughts on what caused this to happen (bad driver install, bad graphics card, etc.) I'd appreciate it.

Right now I'm off to do some serious work and use OSX (the reason I bought this machine in the first place!). It's obscenely fast, obscenely quiet, and indecently good looking. It's also cheaper than the PC workstation it replaces, which is nice