Looks like I will probably get 7 years or more out of this 06 Mac Pro. Is this possible or will something break or OS X not be supported in the future?
I have 16GB on this thing, the Apple 4870 512MB card 4x 2.66Mhz, 10.6.2.
It runs games great, Trading on this runs with no issue either. And CPU 96% idle right now.
(This with two virtual machines running on an other spaces, Fedora 12 and XP)
It seems the Macs are long life computers compared to yesteryears desktops.
It's all going to depend on what you do/need out of the system.
The '06 - '07 models use EFI32 firmware, and it could be an issue to you, despite the capabilities of the system otherwise. Graphics cards are already beginning to be a problem (nVidia GTX285 won't work, as it requires EFI64). ATI will likely continue to use EBC based firmware, so you might be able to access a newer model or two there, until firmware goes 128bit, where the specification may change.
And it will become a problem with OS X as well when it goes exclusively to K64 (assuming you want/need to update from the last version of K32 version of OS X, and SL may be the last K32 version).
If you won't need more in terms of OS X or graphics cards, you'll be fine. They're also quite capable as Windows workstations.
This shouldn't be the case, given the use of Xeon parts, but Apple treats them as consumer systems (support for ~3years, rather than the industry standard of 5 for workstations/servers from the date of the parts intitial release by any other vendor).
Also worth pointing out:
The increase in speed as a result of tighter software development has started lagging behind hardware improvements. Sure, we've got 8 cores, multithreaded code, and GPU acceleration, but fewer than a dozen apps actually use it.
Quite true. Software is well behind hardware at this point. And is some cases, multi-threaded isn't going to provide an advantage (i.e. word processing, where the application spends most of it's time waiting on keyboard input).
I would say Mac Pros could be expected to last a good deal longer than your previous G5s or G4s, unless switches off of x86 (unlikely, at this juncture). I expect my computer to still be comfortably usable for at least 5 more years, because the software has not caught up with it at all.
In general, Yes.
But the EFI32 based systems days are numbered for certain uses (where ever upgrades would be needed to continue with true 64 bit operation <including hardware> or need of new standards that don't appear until pure 64 bit systems <K64 only OS X>).
Intel's cranking out faster CPUs and chipsets, but only the graphics/media/research people would really notice the improvements at this point. It's easy to forget this on the Mac Pro forum, but realistically, Core 2 Duo will serve the needs of 95% of the computer using population for another 3-6 years, no trouble. Most software isn't even 64-bit yet. And most recently released Macs are 64-bit ready.
I'm not so sure about C2D going quite that long (6 yrs), but they've a decent life left. C2Q, would make more sense, as I'd think software developers will start to catch up with multi-threaded apps in ~3 - 4 years (far better presence than currently exists, not as extensive as possible).
But the EFI32 systems may be an exception to the rule for certain uses. Sad, but there's no way to upgrade the firmware, and Apple seems to have zero interest in supporting those systems for much longer (drops as soon as the K64 only version of OS X ships).
