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About To Order Mac Pro - Help Me Out

M

Mr.PS

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 8, 2008
528
9
I plan on ordering a Mac Pro in a few days.

Specs:
Single processor 2.8ghz Quad Core Xeon
2GB of Ram
320gb 3gb/sec HDD
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics with 256MB memory
No Displays
No Extras

I'm going to go with the Radeon as I feel new cards will pop up for the new Cinema Displays equipped with Display Port soon, thus making the 8800 pretty much obsolete. Plus, all I do is text editing, little bit of photoshop, and browsing/terminal.

I'm not going to purchase a Cinema display until the new ones come out. I have a Dell 2005FPW that can hold me over for the time being. So I'm not too worried about that.

As for HDD's and RAM. I plan on getting two 160gb 10,000 RPM WD Raptors and software Raid 0'ing them. Will there be any issues with that? Also, I plan to add 2gb of ram to have 4gb. Where can I get ram for the new Mac Pro? How much will 2gb run?

Another question. Will that setup most likely be found locally? Can I just go and pick it up locally somewhere? It's stock outside of the single quad, vs 8 cores.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. :)
 
Ok.. Listen here...

the 160GB 10k raptors aren't going to boost your speed that much... So don't waste your money. Software raid 0 is so risky, if one drive fails... you lose both drives. Just buy a 500 gig aftermarket... newegg.com or macsales.com.

Display port doesn't matter, who gives a crap with how you connect, DVI is fine (HDCP does matter though..).

As for the ram.. plop out the $400 from MACSALES.com for 8 gigs and you'll be fine. Macsales.com has good mac pro ram, the owc brand is good and cheap.

Your single processor won't be found locally. Only the base models are in the store aka 8 core. Sorry. Hope i was of help.

But once again, don't RAID it or get the raptors, so not worth it
 
for what you're doing i don't see the importance of raid. I would be tempted to just up the apple hard drive to 500gb or 750, seems like less of a hassle with a marginal cost difference. Of course this is not the case for the ram.

I'm not sure what the wait time is for the single cpu but the standard double is just a couple days with all the basic options. This may be worth it if you plan on using photoshop extensively in the future.

with the display i think you'll be waiting till 4th quarter of this year at the earliest or the next processor update in which case they'll probably change both the display and case design to match.
 
i agree with the above posters on your hard drive choice. Unless you are using as a server and are constantly reading and writing small packets of information you won't see any significant performance boost. You are seriously better off getting one of the new breed of 7200rpm drives, such as the Seagate 7200.11 or as i've done 3x Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives. One will be used as a system drive (which is already faster than a raptor in everyday use), and then RAID 0 the other two so i can have a good scratch disk.

for the price of 2 raptors you can get one of these drives and have more than 3 times the space and in many instances a faster hard drive than Raid Raptors.. not to mention quieter too!

there is a new raptor coming out at some point, probably better to get a good 1TB drive and wait for the revision to release.

go to barefeats and tom's hardware and check out the scores for these new 1tb drives :)
 
Trishul said:
i agree with the above posters on your hard drive choice. Unless you are using as a server and are constantly reading and writing small packets of information you won't see any significant performance boost. You are seriously better off getting one of the new breed of 7200rpm drives, such as the Seagate 7200.11 or as i've done 3x Samsung Spinpoint F1 drives. One will be used as a system drive (which is already faster than a raptor in everyday use), and then RAID 0 the other two so i can have a good scratch disk.

for the price of 2 raptors you can get one of these drives and have more than 3 times the space and in many instances a faster hard drive than Raid Raptors.. not to mention quieter too!

there is a new raptor coming out at some point, probably better to get a good 1TB drive and wait for the revision to release.

go to barefeats and tom's hardware and check out the scores for these new 1tb drives :)
Click to expand...

I will be handing down this Mac to someone in my family if something new comes out. I'm prepared to wait, I don't really care. As for drives. I'm not looking for space. I don't need that much. I'm just looking for speed. I've ran 2 raptors in raid 0 on my windows box since 2003 and have never had any problems. Good images/backups make up for any decreased reliability that a raid 0 stripping array might invoke. But I guess you are right, I can just use the stock 320GB 3gb/sec drive for now. Does anyone know which drive comes with the new Mac Pro?

I'm looking for an additional 2gb over the stock 2gb in the current mac Pro. Where can I pick up the cheapest set?

Thanks for all of the replies.
 
Mr.PS said:
I will be handing down this Mac to someone in my family if something new comes out. I'm prepared to wait, I don't really care. As for drives. I'm not looking for space. I don't need that much. I'm just looking for speed. I've ran 2 raptors in raid 0 on my windows box since 2003 and have never had any problems. Good images/backups make up for any decreased reliability that a raid 0 stripping array might invoke. But I guess you are right, I can just use the stock 320GB 3gb/sec drive for now. Does anyone know which drive comes with the new Mac Pro?

I'm looking for an additional 2gb over the stock 2gb in the current mac Pro. Where can I pick up the cheapest set?

Thanks for all of the replies.
Click to expand...

www.macsales.com, also known as Other World Computing.
 
Trishul said:
there is a new raptor coming out at some point, probably better to get a good 1TB drive and wait for the revision to release.
Click to expand...
I'm eagerly waiting for this to happen. I'm gonna slug it out on the 320GB/8MB OEM snail drive until a new raptor is released. it's gotta be soon considering the current 150GB raptor has been out since early 2006 and has lost most of its performance edge against modern SATA/300 drives.
 
Thanks for the info. So the 320gb 3gb/sec HDD in the stock Mac Pro is pretty fast?

Thanks for the memory link, at $129 it's a steal for 2gb! 4gb will suit me well!
 
Will the Ati 2600XT be more then enough for text editing, photo editing, and regular browsing?
 
Mr.PS said:
Will the Ati 2600XT be more then enough for text editing, photo editing, and regular browsing?
Click to expand...

Should be - I give it to my nephew and he's happy WoW is running better than his old crappy video card, so for casual use (meaning you won't do any HD video editing or something like that), it's fine. For gaming use, think it will get outdated in 2 years or less.
 
noi375 said:
Should be - I give it to my nephew and he's happy WoW is running better than his old crappy video card, so for casual use (meaning you won't do any HD video editing or something like that), it's fine. For gaming use, think it will get outdated in 2 years or less.
Click to expand...

I don't game so it won't be an issue. :) Ok, I'm going to go ahead and order.
 
I got the ATI and have to say that Aperture is running great with a library of some 8,000 images. No slowdown there (once I upgrade my RAM anyway) and Aperture does hit on the GPU.
 
It's done. I ordered it. I made a deal with my Dad. If a new mac pro comes out this year. I will hand this one down and order a new one. If a new ACD comes out, same deal.

I will pick up a ACD locally most likely soon, a 30" for sure, and ride it out until something new does indeed come out.

As for my purchase, I couldn't be happier. :)

I ordered 4gb of extra ram to (from a 3rd party), for a total of 6gb. It should be lightening.

Specs Recap (excitement):
2.8ghz single processor quad core xeon
2gb of ram
320gb 3gb/sec HDD
Ati Radeon HD 2600 XT 256mb
30" ACD (possibly shortly - locally)
 
If you have some spare money, think about replacing the hard drive - the one that came with Mac Pro has only 8 mb cache (for the 320 mb hard drive), which can slow things down, depending on what application you are using. So I would at least start to plan on upgrading that.
 
noi375 said:
If you have some spare money, think about replacing the hard drive - the one that came with Mac Pro has only 8 mb cache (for the 320 mb hard drive), which can slow things down, depending on what application you are using. So I would at least start to plan on upgrading that.
Click to expand...

I think it will do fine for regular photoshop, text editing, and browsing.
 
Just picked up a 30" ACD that will be here waiting for my Mac Pro next monday, w00t w00t! :)
 
I'm thinking about ordering a Mac Pro but I wondered do they have bluetooth in them as standard? I've looked at the BTO options and there is a BTO Airport card but no Bluetooth.
 
I just cannot wait any longer. My business is expanding fast and I'm limited to what I can do by screen size and performance. I'm sick of windows and would rather not invest any more money into windows operating systems or programs designed for windows, the switch was unavoidable to me.

I wanted to wait for new hardware, but the Mac Pro just came out, the Cinema Displays are very nice too, and will suit me well. Like I said though, I will be passing down the wonderful Mac Pro and Cinema 30" if something better does indeed come out sooner.
 
What kind of sound does the Mac Pro come with? On board I assume, built into the chipset? Or?
 
My Mac Pro just shipped, it is said to arrive by Tuesday. Has anyones come in a day early? When I order from Newegg stuff usally comes in a day before the estimated shipping date.
 
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