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Just got my new quad Mac Pro!

D

DetroitRockCity

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 23, 2009
71
0
Detroit, Michigan
I just received my new Mac Pro from apple on Saturday. This thing is a beast! I am planning on running apps from Final Cut Studio 3, Photoshop, After Effects, and others.

2.66 Quad/6GB RAM (OWC)/640GB HD/ATI 4870



I have a few questions.
1.) Is it normal for the Mac Pro's fans to make a lot of noise when you first start it up or wake it from sleep? My fans make a lot of noise for about 16 seconds or so.
2.) I am planning to put a second optical drive in it. Is there a way to eject only one tray at a time, or will it do both?

Now, I am selling my iMac for around $800 and I am looking at some upgrades:

an additional 21.5" Acer LCD display
a mini display port to dvi adapter
a LG blu ray burner
two 1TB samsung internal HDs
a blu ray player (I do not have one yet)
Elgato Eye TV hybrid


Well, what do you think?
I love this machine!
 
1) The fans will run upon wake from sleep or startup. It is ok and should last less than 20 seconds.
2) Yes, you can eject one drive at a time. To eject the 2nd drive hold down command plus eject (instead of just eject).
 
2+ to jessica's replies (she beat me to it).
Congrats - welcome to the club! Your new beast will blow the iMac out of the water. Run all you apps at once and still surf the web without breaking a sweat.
 
Instead of some of those upgrades, I'd go for either a Radeon 4870 or GTX 285 to up the GPU oomph. In addition to those, you will feel the speed much more if you opt for a nice SSD as your boot/apps drive.

More than one monitor is always nice too :cool:
 
DetroitRockCity said:
I just received my new Mac Pro from apple on Saturday. This thing is a beast! I am planning on running apps from Final Cut Studio 3, Photoshop, After Effects, and others.

2.66 Quad/6GB RAM (OWC)/640GB HD/ATI 4870



I have a few questions.
1.) Is it normal for the Mac Pro's fans to make a lot of noise when you first start it up or wake it from sleep? My fans make a lot of noise for about 16 seconds or so.
2.) I am planning to put a second optical drive in it. Is there a way to eject only one tray at a time, or will it do both?

Now, I am selling my iMac for around $800 and I am looking at some upgrades:

an additional 21.5" Acer LCD display
a mini display port to dvi adapter
a LG blu ray burner
two 1TB samsung internal HDs
a blu ray player (I do not have one yet)
Elgato Eye TV hybrid


Well, what do you think?
I love this machine!
Click to expand...

For photo editing, get the best monitor you can find. Avoid TN panels at all costs if you need color clarity and depth. S-IPS, H-IPS, M-PVA, S-PVA are the better panel choices, as they are true 8-bit panels. Apple and Dell's higher end monitors are said to be the best.

Good choice on the RAM; part of me whines I should have gone OWC, but with student discount and Apple testing everything in-store so I wouldn't get a bad memory module, I bit the bullet... OWC's price was $6 lower ($219 instead of $225 and if I could live with 8GB under Vista, it'll really be sweet under OS X. Otherwise I'd have gone 12 or 16... $640 is a lot less than what used to be said for 4GB-density modules...)

The model you bought is a GREAT model. I bought the same, though as you do video effects you did the right thing by stopping at 6GB - because the RAM will run in triple data speed instead of double data speed, which means a nominal performance increase for apps like After Effects...
 
thermodynamic said:
For photo editing, get the best monitor you can find. Avoid TN panels at all costs if you need color clarity and depth. S-IPS, H-IPS, M-PVA, S-PVA are the better panel choices, as they are true 8-bit panels. Apple and Dell's higher end monitors are said to be the best.
Click to expand...
That would fall into NEC or Eizo Nanao territory , and they are anything but inexpensive. :p

That said, if it's needed, take a serious look at NEC. Specifically the models with a lower case i in the model number, as they have IPS panels (H-IPS IIRC). They're less expensive than Eizo's (FlexScan's use S-PVA, and the Color Edge's uses IPS <S-IPS?>).
 
nanofrog said:
That would fall into NEC or Eizo Nanao territory , and they are anything but inexpensive. :p

That said, if it's needed, take a serious look at NEC. Specifically the models with a lower case i in the model number, as they have IPS panels (H-IPS IIRC). They're less expensive than Eizo's (FlexScan's use S-PVA, and the Color Edge's uses IPS <S-IPS?>).
Click to expand...

True, they are pricey... I currently use the Soyo Topaz S, rev "D" (avoid "E" rev) as it uses a M-PVA panel and is almost as good as my iMac screen. But the 24" iMac's H-IPS is definitely better.

Thanks MUCH for the NEC info - I will keep my eyes open... Soyos are great, but one has developed a minor and intermittent fault...
 
I'm hoping to get that model as a replacement for my old mac pro quad. I'm actually on the phone with Applecare right now lol!

Congrats! You're gonna love this thing for editing. They last a long time too. I've had mine 3 years now. (It's only now just giving me problems, but mine was a store demo model. Doesn't surprise me.)
 
any ideas?
What programs take advantage of Snow Leopard features (64-bit, Grand Dispatch, OpenCL)?

The programs in question for me are Toast (blu-ray stuff), Handbrake, Final Cut Studio 3, Compressor.


Also, (and this may be a better question for digital video section) does Compressor work better than Quicktime Conversion in OS X 10.6?
 
DetroitRockCity said:
any ideas?
What programs take advantage of Snow Leopard features (64-bit, Grand Dispatch, OpenCL)?

The programs in question for me are Toast (blu-ray stuff), Handbrake, Final Cut Studio 3, Compressor.


Also, (and this may be a better question for digital video section) does Compressor work better than Quicktime Conversion in OS X 10.6?
Click to expand...

Please let me know what you find with Toast & blu-ray...
 
DetroitRockCity said:
any ideas?
What programs take advantage of Snow Leopard features (64-bit, Grand Dispatch, OpenCL)?

The programs in question for me are Toast (blu-ray stuff), Handbrake, Final Cut Studio 3, Compressor.


Also, (and this may be a better question for digital video section) does Compressor work better than Quicktime Conversion in OS X 10.6?
Click to expand...

There is nothing out there right now apart from special Open CL benchmarking software that can fully take advantage of GPU processing. Guess we will just have to wait for optimized code. :rolleyes:
 
DetroitRockCity said:
I just received my new Mac Pro from apple on Saturday. This thing is a beast! I am planning on running apps from Final Cut Studio 3, Photoshop, After Effects, and others.

2.66 Quad/6GB RAM (OWC)/640GB HD/ATI 4870

Well, what do you think?
I love this machine!
Click to expand...

I got the same machine off Apple's refurb store. I absolutely LOVE the
thing. Course I was upgrading from a 1.5ghz G4 powerbook so ANYTHING
was going to seem fast but WOW.......it will zip through video editing
like it is nothing. I had a special filter configuration I made up for
FCP editing that I would apply to my TV spots.......it took my old computer
18 hours to render.......with this machine? 4 minutes!!!
 
My old iMac took around 1.5 hours to render about 30 minutes of AVCHD footage (ProRes) with all my effects. My Mac Pro takes about 40-50 minutes. I think that is an amazing step up.
 
So I finally bought my upgrades on the 'egg.
1TB Samsung drives (x2 so I can run RAID 1 for redundancy)
LG Blu Ray burner
Elgato Eye TV
and another Acer 21.5" 1080p monitor.
 
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