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Bit the bullet and bought a Mac Pro for my work

C

Crawn2003

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 8, 2005
444
0
Santa Rosa, California
Well the G4/G5 setup I had wasn't working for me anymore. Just wasn't keeping up with what I demanded of it. The G4 Dual 800 couldn't encode as fast as I'd liked it to and the G5 Dual 2.5 was getting the same way. Not to mention that I have about 5 jobs ahead of me that require A LOT of video editing and then encoding. To top it all off even more photography, probably around 100-150 shots a day of RAW files from a Phase One back. I traded in the Dual 800 G4 for a Mac Pro!

Mac Pro
Two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
10GB DDR2 Ram
4x 500GB Hard Drives
ATI Radeon X1900XT
30" Cinema Display
23" Cinema Display
Airport
Apple Care

What's really funny is that this system costs just as much as the Dual G4 800mhz did when I got it back in 2001. The kicker is that the Dual G4 had basically stock things and no displays with it and it was the price of the Dual G4.

My goal is to keep this system just as long as the G4, 6 years. The G4 served me really well and I'm hoping this one will too!

~Crawn
 
Very impressive. Looking forward to hearing your reports on how fast that Mac Pro crunches video, along with pictures of the Dual Apple Cinema Display setup.

Still waiting for mine to arrive, 8 more days..
 
Nice setup bro'. How did you get 6.5gigs of RAM though? I thought it had to be in pairs.
Buying the 3.0 isn't really "biting the bullet", as even when the new Mac Pro's come out, they won't be much better than your current setup. If at all.
 
ob81 said:
Nice setup bro'. How did you get 6.5gigs of RAM though? I thought it had to be in pairs.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was about to ask the same thing. Please tell me you didn't get all those 500 gig drives and the memory from Apple. They charge highway robbery prices for those BTO options. You could have saved a considerable amount of $$ by buying the hard drives and memory aftermarket.

At any rate though, enjoy that machine!
 
Question on screen set up

May I ask how you deal with the different resolution of the 2 screens?

I intend to go for a similar set up:

- my current 21 inch screen (1600 x 1200)
- a Dell 30 inch screen

I am trying to figure out how things work out for the desktop since the resolution of the 2 screen is different.

Thanks

Regards,
Bernard
 
Bernardl said:
May I ask how you deal with the different resolution of the 2 screens?

I intend to go for a similar set up:

- my current 21 inch screen (1600 x 1200)
- a Dell 30 inch screen

I am trying to figure out how things work out for the desktop since the resolution of the 2 screen is different.

Thanks

Regards,
Bernard
Click to expand...

What do you need to know? With two screens of different resolution you basically just have a master and slave set-up. They run at independent resolutions and only one screen as the menubar (master). The max resolution you can run on the combined screens may be limited by the graphics card you have.
 
hayduke said:
What do you need to know? With two screens of different resolution you basically just have a master and slave set-up. They run at independent resolutions and only one screen as the menubar (master). The max resolution you can run on the combined screens may be limited by the graphics card you have.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. I have a recent 8 core Mac Pro with a XT1900. I think that it should support 2520x1600 and 1600x1200, right?

What I would like to know is:

1. Where does the dock go? I assume that it goes on the master per your explanation?
2. Can I access the screen estate of the second screen from all OSX applications (PS CS3 mainly)?
3. Is there a way to callibrate both screens?

Thank you in advance,

Regards,
Bernard
 
Lol, sorry, it's 10GB of RAM. I had a brain fart and was thinking of the G5 Dual 2.5...

That's what I get when I try to multitask between 2 different things when posting on Macrumors forum!

~Crawn

P.S. I'll post pictures next week when it arrives! Maybe some screen shots too!

716330921_a1b58dcf7e_o.jpg
 
Wild-Bill said:
Yeah, I was about to ask the same thing. Please tell me you didn't get all those 500 gig drives and the memory from Apple. They charge highway robbery prices for those BTO options. You could have saved a considerable amount of $$ by buying the hard drives and memory aftermarket.

At any rate though, enjoy that machine!
Click to expand...

I know! Apple vs. other places shows you just how much of a markup they put on their items! I'm getting the memory through OWC along with the harddrives which are sitting on my desk waiting for the Mac Pro to arrive.

It's been fun through the last few years to see how much Apple charges for their components vs. the rest of the online/local retail places have for them. It's sometimes between 50-75% markup!

~Crawn
 
How much of a performance boost do you get with the RAM over 4GBs?

We're waiting for the Mac Pro w/ BR. Then we'll pull the trigger. Let us know what you like and what you would do differently.
 
value of RAM

Well, I'll answer since I have 16 GB on mine.

PS does clearly use max 3GB, but a recent update enables it to use RAM as virtual memory instead of disk. I feel that this does speed up significantly some applications.

I intend to spend a bit of time benchmarking all this, but no time recently.

Cheers,
Bernard
 
Crawn2003 said:
I'm getting the memory through OWC along with the harddrives which are sitting on my desk waiting for the Mac Pro to arrive.
~Crawn
Click to expand...


OK. I feel waaaaay better about your purchase now! Way to go Crawn! Enjoy that beast when it arrives, and do post your initial impressions. :D
 
I just bought a 2.6 with the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card, 4GB of RAM, and a bunch of third party bought hard drives. Added a wifi card myself and using a USB BT adapter I got for $10 at OWC. Wondering If it's worth it to upgrade to a better video card and more RAM. I do some basic audio/video and a little imaging/web stuff. The Radeon 1900 seems a bit expensive for what you get, but I wonder if the 7300 is slowing me down. I've heard that FCP uses more than 4GB, but it didn't seem to do much with 8GB on my PM Quad.

Congrats BTW. I was going to wait for the next update, but I couldn't pass up the deal I got. And who knows when SS will be available from Intel in quantity. I'd rather have it now to use. Seems worth it to me so far. Some things aren't that much fast than my G5, but rendering definitely is.
 
solvs said:
I've heard that FCP uses more than 4GB, but it didn't seem to do much with 8GB on my PM Quad.
Click to expand...

The truth to that rumor is that Final Cut Pro is still a 32 bit application. It can't address that much memory.

Final Cut Pro uses up to 2.5 gigs of ram, the rest is for OSX.

It still is a good idea to have 4-5 gigs of ram so you can multi-task without a slow-down. I only have 3 gigs of ram but I haven't had any intense projects thrown at me just yet.

As far as video cards go, the 7300 GT is just fine for me, it's the best video card I've ever used, I'm getting some pretty good gaming performance. I guess I'm not a true gamer because I don't have the crazy high end 2007 video cards.
 
FF_productions said:
The truth to that rumor is that Final Cut Pro is still a 32 bit application. It can't address that much memory.

Final Cut Pro uses up to 2.5 gigs of ram, the rest is for OSX.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I was playing with FCS2 yesterday and just noticed that. Even tried it in Leopard, same thing. I think I went up to 3.something, but that was for everything running. Maybe the next version, or a free update. :(

As far as video cards go, the 7300 GT is just fine for me
Click to expand...
I don't game at all, but I was hoping the Radeon might speed things up anyway. I've seen the benchmarks, but in real world performance for what I do, it doesn't seem worth the money. Maybe whatever comes out next will be. I've heard you can't use a DVI-TV adapter with the 7300, but I'm not paying ~$400 + $20 for TV out. Yet.
 
solvs said:
Yeah, I was playing with FCS2 yesterday and just noticed that. Even tried it in Leopard, same thing. I think I went up to 3.something, but that was for everything running. Maybe the next version, or a free update.
Click to expand...

OS X isn't truly 64-bit. The memory management (and file management, I believe) is 64-bit, but the graphical libraries aren't. So none of the graphically intensive applications can be 64-bit. And until that's true, then none of the applications will be able to address anything north of 4GB.

I understand that one of the benefits of 10.5 will be complete 64-bit libraries. If that's the case, we'll THEN have to wait for the application developers to re-do their applications for 64-bit memory access. Then we'll see the Photoshops and Final Cuts eating up gobs more memory.

jas
 
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