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Feeling pretty good about my Early 2008 Mac Pro.

More said:
Just some initial gut reactions in here

Still taking-in the new Mac Pro specs but my initial reaction is that I'm SOOOO glad I bought the top of the line 2008 Mac Pro just over a month and a half ago. The new specs look nice but my god... those prices are absolutely breathtaking. A new top of the line Mac Pro that doesn't even break the 3GHz specs costs nearly £4500. Bee jeeezus!

I'm sure the new machine crunches some serious data but come on. Those prices are knock out stuff. Ahh... I love my 2008 Mac Pro and 30" cinema display with the Intel X25-Ms. Yum :D

No external design changes either. Ahh... and relax.
Click to expand...

I decided to buy my 2008 just after Macworld 2009 and noticing that the pound was falling significantly against the dollar. My guess was that the prices were going to go up significantly in the UK for the new Mac Pro and they have. My octo-Pro came in (Edu discount) at £1700 (inc AppleCare) and I bought 16GB RAM and hard drives elsewhere to take the total to about £2000. The new model comes in at £2100 (Edu discount)before (IIRC) adding an extra superdrive (£80!) or AirportExtreme, or the other odds and ends people often need. I'm very happy I bought when I did ... :)
 
revisionA said:
We can instead of selling/buying, upgrade and wait for another revision.

I am fully into every other update from now on. It seems a sensible path.

Also, putting the dualcore WD Caviar Black 1TB into my pro was a very sound investment.

Hoping that 8 gb of RAM will also feel as warm and fuzzy in retrospect.

$
Click to expand...

What sort of performance increase did you see by switching to that HDD?
My primary HDD (in sig) seems to be my current system bottleneck so if anything significant can be gained by upgrading to the WD Caviar Black then I might consider it!
 
nanofrog said:
If it happens, I'd check out Apple's Authorized Resellers and look for refurbished models as well. They might use this outlet to dispose of the '08 models left over. ;)

Good luck. :)
Click to expand...

I hope is to land a dual 2.83 GHz Xeon Mac Pro for $2200-$2400, then upgrade it to a 4870 video card, and 24-32GB ram.
 
From my perspective and my usage, I need cores. I could care less that a quad can spank an octo in encoding. If I encode all day long, everyday, then I'd buy a render farm. However, I'll be setting up my daughters Core i7 Nehalem hackintosh as a Compressor node. I run anywhere from 2-4 concurrent virtual machines depending on what I'm doing and more cores the better.

For me, I would think the 2.26 could actually be a bit slower. While the 2.26 can be 40%-60+% faster in encoding, regular "application" benchmarks probably won't see as huge of a gain. I'll pass on this revision and wait for Westmere.
 
ildondeigiocchi said:
I think that the 8 Core 2008 2.8GHZ will still overpower the new 2.66GHZ Quad and that is why I am proud to say I am keeping my Octocore beast. I am just going to be upgrading my 8800 to the 4870 which I must say I am really disappointed in Apple for not offering a better graphics card.
Click to expand...

Well, what better video cards would be out there? No SLI support so it looks like the GTX295 is out. Maybe the GTX285, but beyond that, only the 4870X2 (again, no multi-GPU support in Mac OS X) and the 4870 1GB are available. And, given that ATI writes their own drivers for Mac OS X, and that ATI cards have tended to perform much better under OS X for gaming and all-purpose use, I'd say the 4870 was the best choice.

peskaa said:
Woohoo!

How much of a performance increase will a 4870 give over an 8800GT in gaming under Windows?
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The 4870 should give you a 30-40% boost in games, and in newer ones, the gap gets larger

Also, for GPGPU work, the 4870 has up to 1.2 Teraflops of computational power vs less than half of that for the 8800 GT

(the 4870 really took the PC world by storm last june)
 
Next question, will any 4870 video card work, or does it need to be a specific apple certified card, that they put a proprietary chip on, which enables it work with their systems? It would be nice to go on newegg, and pick up a 1GB 4870 video card for ~ $200 and slap that inside the Mac Pro.
 
GodWhomIsMike said:
Next question, will any 4870 video card work, or does it need to be a specific apple certified card, that they put a proprietary chip on, which enables it work with their systems? It would be nice to go on newegg, and pick up a 1GB 4870 video card for ~ $200 and slap that inside the Mac Pro.
Click to expand...

Apple aren't that stupid! If you want to work from stock, only the Apple card will work. However, people have been flashing the ROMs on standard PC cards for years - so once they get hold of the ROM from the new Apple 4870, I expect to see flashing being an option.
 
peskaa said:
Apple aren't that stupid! If you want to work from stock, only the Apple card will work. However, people have been flashing the ROMs on standard PC cards for years - so once they get hold of the ROM from the new Apple 4870, I expect to see flashing being an option.
Click to expand...

I kind of figured as much. Well, hopefully someone is savvy enough to figure out how to flash a third-part 1GB ATI 4870 video card to make it work flawlessly inside a Mac Pro.
 
paulg1979 said:
No we were referring to newegg. I would buy from Apple but they seem a little expensive. I assume I need the one from Apple which has the mini display port as I want to connect the 24" LED display to my Mac Pro
Click to expand...

Ah right, sorry about that.

Isn't the standard 4870 available from UK retailers at reasonable (read: non-apple) prices? The 1GB 4870 from NewEgg is going to run to close to £160-170 when shipped and taxed upon import and it is available from various online stores (quick Google search) for around that figure, notwithstanding the reduced hassle.

Unless another manufacturer releases a standard 4870 with Mini DisplayPort then yes, I would imagine you need the one from Apple. That said, if a standard 4870 proves to be flashable to EFI firmware (here's hoping) then you could always use an adaptor, no?
 
i thought i would see more from the new mac pro but the only difference that would make feel getting the new mac pro is the cpus, but i'm very happy that i bought my mac pro last 3 months & i don't regret that at all!
now the only thing i'll do is buy that new 4870 and start playing games :)
 
The 2.66ghz Quad will indeed beat the 08 2.8ghz Octo. Even despite the lower clock and half the cores.

Intel don't price their processors based on Ghz or Cores, they price them based on performance. And Apple got these chips a month before anyone else, in a months time you should realise how cheap this machine is compared to DIY or Dell.
 
nick9191 said:
The 2.66ghz Quad will indeed beat the 08 2.8ghz Octo. Even despite the lower clock and half the cores.
Click to expand...

I think that depends on what you use it for. If you are doing
something that can utilize all 8-cores, the quad won't beat it.
 
nick9191 said:
The 2.66ghz Quad will indeed beat the 08 2.8ghz Octo. Even despite the lower clock and half the cores.

Intel don't price their processors based on Ghz or Cores, they price them based on performance. And Apple got these chips a month before anyone else, in a months time you should realise how cheap this machine is compared to DIY or Dell.
Click to expand...
I'm not so sure on the DIY end this time. :eek: ;)

But we will have to see what the boards go for. Memory and CPU's already have pricing available. So far, it looks to be cheaper, but there are sacrifices, such as a warranty, and ready to go out of the box.
 
nick9191 said:
The 2.66ghz Quad will indeed beat the 08 2.8ghz Octo. Even despite the lower clock and half the cores.

Intel don't price their processors based on Ghz or Cores, they price them based on performance. And Apple got these chips a month before anyone else, in a months time you should realise how cheap this machine is compared to DIY or Dell.
Click to expand...

Well, that depends what you're using it for, but yeah, the price probably isn't really too unreasonable. Not an issue for me personally as the '08 octo is already overkill, but YMMV.
 
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