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Apple Introduces New Mac Pro with Nehalem Xeon Processors
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As a switcher-in-waiting. in need of a Mac Pro for HD Video with FCS and music production with Logic Studio, I have been waiting for this upgrade for some time, but find myself now with more questions than before. Maybe a few of you will be kind enough to answer some of them. I've never owned a Mac before so do I excuse me if I make any schoolboy error.
1) Am I restricted to only using the two graphics cards that Apple have made available for this model or will other cards work just as well? (Although, I presume that these cards will be the only ones made with Apple's proprietary mini display connectors).
2) Same question as above with regards the HDD
3) Now that Time Machine exists, is there really any need to buy a RAID card for making mirrored backups? Isn't that what Time Machine is for?
4) From reading the posts, I understand that I should never buy RAM from Apple and I will want to increase my RAM as my workload increases so favour buying 4GB matched pairs from scratch, but I notice that even OWC are only advertising their 4GB modules in 32GB packages and Crucial have no DDR3 advertised yet. Other than Apple wanting to keep the plebs dirty hands off their flagship machine, is their any technical reason why 4GB module pairs could not be added incrementally?
1) Am I restricted to only using the two graphics cards that Apple have made available for this model or will other cards work just as well? (Although, I presume that these cards will be the only ones made with Apple's proprietary mini display connectors).
2) Same question as above with regards the HDD
3) Now that Time Machine exists, is there really any need to buy a RAID card for making mirrored backups? Isn't that what Time Machine is for?
4) From reading the posts, I understand that I should never buy RAM from Apple and I will want to increase my RAM as my workload increases so favour buying 4GB matched pairs from scratch, but I notice that even OWC are only advertising their 4GB modules in 32GB packages and Crucial have no DDR3 advertised yet. Other than Apple wanting to keep the plebs dirty hands off their flagship machine, is their any technical reason why 4GB module pairs could not be added incrementally?
It waits to be seen if the new quad can out perform the 2.8 octo, and without waiting 2 years for todays apps to utilise hyperthreading, and whatever new features are in there, if it can't out perform the octo 2.8 in real world tasks (I noticed that the apple site has no Logic Pro comparisons on there which I really wanna know) then it won't sound like good value for the money.
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No matter what happens with the mac, as long as the iPhone farts people will be happy
1. Good question, one that I have as well. I wouldn't mind the option of putting an aftermarket FX5600 Quadro in there later, a card that was previously available on the MP.
2. You can put pretty much any SATA2 drive in there (someone correct me if I'm wrong).
3. Time Machine definitely doesn't negate the need for RAID, especially RAID 1. If one drive dies, with RAID you can continue working. With a single drive and TM, you can recover your machine image and thus your data, but you've got to put a new drive in, boot from the OS X disk, and recover from TM backup, which takes a good amount of time, say an hour and a half from a USB2 drive (at least in my experience).
4. As far as I know, you can add pairs as you go. That's always been the case with any machine I've ever worked on, and unless there's something odd with this one it should be the same. A phonecall to OWC would tell you for sure though. That's who I got my memory from for my MBP, and who I'll be ordering our MP memory from. $1000 less for 32GB is a significant savings.
Apple claims its memory is superior, especially in terms of temperature which would make the system substantially cooler and more importantly, quieter. Is this in any sense supported by facts/research/etc? As I am as allergic to computer noise as Jobs himself it is important for me and I am willing to pay a premium if it would be true.
Anyone who needs multiple FireWire 800 devices running off their computer, like, oh, say, videographers or musicians who have multiple hard drives or A/V decks running on their computer. Besides, it's not hurting anything.
Aaaaand, that's where FireWire 800 is great. Very fast data transfer, and supported on most, if not all, professional video cameras.
Buy a card, spend 2 minutes installing.
Why? It's a professional tower, not a DVD player. Besides, DisplayPort is expected to become more and more standard, so it will likely substitute well. I don't really see a need for HDMI on this computer though.
With FireWire 800, it's not necessary, since they're perfectly compatible (just need the proper cable or adaptor).
Easy to add if you need it. Of course, you can't burn BD-Video, but that's a software thing and I'm sure someone will offer a solution soon. The Mac Pro's meant to be expandable, not necessarily come with everything you might ever want.
Space saving? It's a freaking workstation tower. It's not meant to save space, because that would sacrifice expandability.
8-core 2.93GHz Nehalem running 32GB of RAM isn't enough? Find me something better, anywhere.
If you're in the market for this computer, it will be putting cash into your pocket, because it's a moneymaker.
Please don't, you're already way off the mark in every way.
Please stick to facts. It does support surround sound, and btw, so do Apple's other offerings (I don't think they sell a computer that doesn't have optical out, but the Mac Pro one-ups the others with a full-size Toslink port instead of a 3.5mm optical jack).
Then buy stuff that's directly compatible. Otherwise you'll need adaptors. It's a fact of life. You've still got DVI, btw, so for most modern monitors you don't need an adaptor, unless you're planning to run a dual display setup and don't get multiple video cards.
I didn't know that. Really. I'm sure Apple supports it in some way, and I would be willing to bet that Snow Leopard will be very effective use of it.
Oh yeah, and Apple delivered a quality desktop yesterday with the new Mac Pro, and they've been delivering them for many years now with the previous Mac Pro's and PowerMac G5's.
jW
Maybe I will. Just seems pretty strange to me that this is their only advertised option on their website.
It's a great question, and past experience with OWC tells me they're very good at providing accurate answers quickly. Great company!
Typically, you've been limited to the ones shipped with Macs, but I would guess ones that worked with previous system might work fine too. They need firmware that is compatible.
That works fine with any SATA drive.
No, Time Machine doesn't replace a RAID setup. I would probably recommend using Time Machine to back up to a RAID setup, as that would give you a very reliable backup if configured correctly.
jW
So I guess you're saying that the difference is the guy without ECC may see glitches in his render? How often does that actually happen?
And for a user who really insists on "workstation" capability, isn't the limitation of 8 gigs kind of a dealbreaker? I don't get the point of using workstation components and charging a workstation price, but also having a ram limitation worse than a $899 consumer machine.
So you're saying it's more reliable? In what way? Fewer crashes? Corrupted data? How often are there problems without ECC memory that could have been prevented by it?
So I guess you're admitting that the MP quad isn't really up to workstation standards?
I really couldn't care less if you take my opinion seriously. I just want to see if you can refute it, and so far you haven't. Having used other brands workstations, you are really going to tell me that a limitation of 8 gigs of ram is really up to "workstation" spec (especially at a time when consumer machines at a fraction of the price can go beyond that)? Yes or no?
You are just making it more obvious how careless you are reading my posts. We were talking about whether I wanted an xmac or a MP for my work - your notion of "what workstations are used for in the professional field" has nothing to do with which mac provides what is needed for me to do my professional work.
And you seem to be working backwards, defining "professional" as someone who needs a Workstation, along with every spec that entails. There's no question there are plenty of professionals who need the speed, memory (which the quad LACKS), and other specs, but not all the other "workstation" things.
What makes you think that any more than that would actually notice the difference? If I sat YOU, oh Workstation Expert, in front of two machines, one with ECC and one without, would you be able to tell which was which?
This thread is quite something 
I'd love one of the 8-core ones with the ATI card and the 24" ACD for home. Seriously considering!
I'd love one of the 8-core ones with the ATI card and the 24" ACD for home. Seriously considering!
I've seen it happen on multiple occasions when trying to use non-ECC stuff, enough where it matters to my business.
No, it's not a deal breaker, at this point in time, and not likely for the 3 year replacement cycle we're on.
See above.
I think it's fine for a workstation, but that the 6600 has a couple extra features that put it slightly ahead for the money. The drawback being that I'd have to use Windows or OSX, which when productivity is taken into account, doesn't make the jump to HP worth it.
In my opinion, yes, it is up to workstation spec. The MP is actually somewhere between the XW4600 (Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, 8GB max RAM) and the XW6600 in spec.
Okay, fair enough. In my experience the features of the quad MP are what professionals require to do their job reliably and with little to no downtime. It apparently differs for your job requirements.
I would when the cheap machine craps the bed, and 14 hours of work are lost, which I've seen happen when cheap, non-workstation machines are used for workstation duties (video rendering, CFD modeling). Again, this is in my experience. Your mileage may (and apparently does) vary.
In the last year, 2 of my servers got to use their ECC memory. It's was the difference between me getting woken up for a crashed machine, and me coming in the next morning to plan some downtime to replace the RAM when it was convenient to me.
Of course, since my line of work isn't using Workstations, it might not seem like it applies here, but it's the same thing for a pro coming in to a failed render and having to start it over after diagnosing the problem vs the same guy coming in to a succesful render but an e-mail from his admin about his RAM needing replacement when it's possible for him.
It totally doesn't apply here. ECC is actually quite important for server applications.
Most of the time, that pro won't even notice it. ECC is important for serious scientific and financial applications, but those kind of "pros" wouldn't be considering Macs for their calculations in the first place. In the creative world, bit errors simply don't matter that much. BTW: PowerMacs used to have non-ECC memory and I can't remember people complaining about it. (except maybe the guys at Virginia Tech who built a cluster out of non-ECC hardware)
Thank you.
For all the people wondering if the 2.93ghz new nehalem quad single proc is better than the octo 2.8, here is the most interesting link i found.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/660861/
I did some research on wikipedi, here it is, I'll quote it for you:
"It has been reported that Nehalem will have a focus on performance, which accounts for the increased core size.[11] Compared to Penryn, Nehalem will have:
* 1.1x to 1.25x the single-threaded performance or 1.2x to 2x the multithreaded performance at the same power level
* 30 % lower power usage for the same performance
* According to a preview from AnandTech "expect a 2030 % overall advantage over Penryn with only a 10 % increase in power usage. It looks like Intel is on track to delivering just that in Q4."[12]
* Core-wise, clock-for-clock, Nehalem will provide a 1520 % increase in performance compared to Penryn.[13]
A 2.93 GHz Nehalem "Bloomfield" system has been used to run a 3DMark Vantage benchmark and gave a CPU score of 17,966.[14] The 2.66 GHz variant scores 16,294. A 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo E6600 scores 4,300.[15]
So, the new xeon "nehalem" 2.93ghz scored 17,966 in 3Dmack Vantage, if anyone know how muc does te 2.8ghz octo scored please post
Flavio
Sorry, I have to disagree though, at least how it applies for me. ECC is quite important for our engineers running 12-14 hour jobs, and heavily using their workstations. In fact their workstation utilization easily tops many of the servers in the building. Again, this is my experience.
You're making the assumption that Mac Pros are used only for "creative" purposes. That's just not 100% the case.
Sigh...
Apple should have offered a top of the line iMac with a quad i7 and a 24" screen and kept the Mac Pro at 8 cores standard at the old price. Instead of offering no quads for imacs and crippling the Mac Pro line.
And an GeForce 260GT would have been nice too... but thats just a dream now.
Apple should have offered a top of the line iMac with a quad i7 and a 24" screen and kept the Mac Pro at 8 cores standard at the old price. Instead of offering no quads for imacs and crippling the Mac Pro line.
And an GeForce 260GT would have been nice too... but thats just a dream now.
Hehe, there is always better, it just depends on how much money you want to spend.
See I am confused I thought ECC was used in making sure the data wasn't corrupted. If a stick of RAM dies (without RAM mirroring) your system is likely to KP/BSOD when something goes to reference the non working RAM stick.
I'm on the case. I have just e-mailed the following request to OWC and will let you know when they reply.
Greetings from the UK,
There is something puzzling a number of posters on various Apple forums regarding the 4GB Memory modules for the new line of Mac Pro machines announced yesterday. Will you please let me know why you are only advertising the 4GB modules as a maxed-out pack of 32GB? A number of posters, myself included, would like to buy 4GB modules, in matched pairs naturally, to build their systems up incrementally. Few can afford to max out at the astronomical prices that a 32GB package currently demands. I notice that the Apple store has the same restriction. Given that this is the first time that we have seen this "bulk purchase option only," is there a technical reason behind this or is it simply some form of restrictive selling licensing deal that is not generally known. I would certainly like to make a purchase of memory from you in the not too distant future, but buying the full Monty all in one go outstrips my budget.
I look forward to clarification on the matter at your earliest convenience.
Kind regards,
Wheetman.
If you store corrupted data in memory, when the system reads back and uses said data, you never know what can happen. It can either be wrong data, filesystem corruption, to a system crash depending on what part of the memory the error was in.
RAM can fail progressively and the first symptoms are usually corrupted bits. We don't take chances, we have service contracts for that reason and if a system logs too many error corrections (they just show up as corrected memory errors in the system log), we change the RAM.
People want to know if the new 2.26GHz Octo is faster than the old 2.8GHz Octo since that's what's replaced the other model. I have no doubt that the 2.93GHz (i.e. top spec) Octo will be a good chunk faster than the previous 3.2GHz model but 2.26GHz will be the normal spec for most buyers now as the 2.8GHz model was before.
I don't know if anyone's thrown this out before in this thread but my hunch is that in a few months time they will do a silent update on the Octo Mac Pro line like they did on the MacBook Pro line with the speeds becoming 2.4GHz, 2.8GHz, 3.2GHz.
Maybe they'll be generous and bump them up to 2.66GHz, 2.93GHz, 3.2GHz but judging by the big jump in markup over the previous generation, I don't think they're in a generous mood.
Nevertheless, I'd say expect minor speed bumps at the same price points in 3-6 months time - maybe at WWDC.
I could maybe swallow a 2.4GHz Octo with the current inflated price tag, 2.66GHz at the 2.26GHz price mark and I'd suck up the price increase with only mild discomfort and put it down to the bad economy.
Hehe, there is always better, it just depends on how much money you want to spend.
Yup. HP makes one that does take 64GB of RAM, so that's definitely better than any MP. It just depends on if you can utilize it, and if it's worth it to you.