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Mac Pro Advice

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bitty417

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 2, 2007
86
0
I'm going to take the plunge and purchase a desktop machine very soon. I would absolutely love the power of a Mac Pro but everything I'm reading tells me new models are coming out shortly.

If they switch over to the new Penryn processors, will they all be Penryn, or will this be the high end machines only? IE - will they continue selling the quad core 2.66's along with the more expensive Penryn processors?

What's everyone's take on this? Should I hold off until the new hardware comes out?

What does everyone feel about the refurb 2.66 for 2199?

Thanks!
 
bitty417 said:
I'm going to take the plunge and purchase a desktop machine very soon. I would absolutely love the power of a Mac Pro but everything I'm reading tells me new models are coming out shortly.

If they switch over to the new Penryn processors, will they all be Penryn, or will this be the high end machines only? IE - will they continue selling the quad core 2.66's along with the more expensive Penryn processors?

What's everyone's take on this? Should I hold off until the new hardware comes out?

What does everyone feel about the refurb 2.66 for 2199?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Depends on what you want to do with it & how desperate you are to have it right now.

There's a fair chance Apple will update the Mac Pros by the end of the year. No way to know if it will be all Penryn or in fact what graphics card they'll release.

If you're a gamer i'd hold off to see what card they offer. Otherwise the axiom is true, buy it now or you'll be waiting forever for the next great thing.

As for me, i'm very happy with my 2Ghz with 1900xt, have upped the memory to 4Gigs and internal storage to 1TB over time, and aside from a nasty graphics card overheating problem, been very happy with it.

M. :D
 
I was considering purchasing the 2.0 from the refurb side .. the deal is great. 1899, but don't see many stats for the 2.0 online.

Are you happy with the performance?

As for my usage -- basic. Web, email, document editing, iTunes, iPhone .. nothing major. Many would say the Mac Pro is overkill, but I have another 27" Dell on the way. Mac Pro could drive them both with the standard vid card.
 
bitty417 said:
I was considering purchasing the 2.0 from the refurb side .. the deal is great. 1899, but don't see many stats for the 2.0 online.

Are you happy with the performance?

As for my usage -- basic. Web, email, document editing, iTunes, iPhone .. nothing major. Many would say the Mac Pro is overkill, but I have another 27" Dell on the way. Mac Pro could drive them both with the standard vid card.
Click to expand...

I'm totally happy with the performance on mine. I mostly use it for web, email, web development & video encoding and transcoding. With the occasional bout of PC games when the urge takes me. I'm running leopard and unless i'm doing a video transcode the cpu rarely creeps past 25% total. I would say majority of the time it's idling. I run a pair of Dell 20" widescreens and my workspace is very adequate.

In terms of performance, plenty of memory and running the boot volume as a RAID stripe will keep it running a lot better than a faster CPU.

M.
 
I'm in exactly the same boat, except my needs are a bit more demanding than yours. I use Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom to work on digital images that get as large as 75 MB. In another thread folks thought that the speed improvement of the new Penryn machines would be worth waiting for, especially if I'm not desperate.

The consensus was that the new Mac Pros are likely to be announced Nov. 15th or thereabouts. That actually works well for me, since Adobe plans to release a software update that will make Lightroom work with Leopard around that same time (it doesn't now). It wouldn't help me to upgrade to a new Mac Pro running Leopard if I can't use the applications I need to use most.

But if all you do is email, web and word processing - I think I Mac Pro could be overkill. If you do go that route, I'm sure a refurbed 2.0 or 2.66 would be more than enough.
 
I live for overkill.

Actually one of the biggest reason's I'm opting for a Mac Pro over an iMac is support for more monitors. I have 3 Dell 27's waiting for this machine. I'm going to wait until mid November. If no updates are announced by then I'm just going to bite the bullet and order it.
 
bitty417 said:
I live for overkill.

Actually one of the biggest reason's I'm opting for a Mac Pro over an iMac is support for more monitors. I have 3 Dell 27's waiting for this machine. I'm going to wait until mid November. If no updates are announced by then I'm just going to bite the bullet and order it.
Click to expand...

Bitty417, you'll love your machine.... the Mac Pro is even better with 3 monitors (see my sig). Enjoy!!

I bet we'll see a refresh in January, but I doubt you'll see any refresh by mid-November. Just my two cents.....
 
Thanks mward!

I'm thoroughly caught up on all of those threads .. been monitoring them for some time now. I'm going to give it until next week -- no later. If I don't see a refresh by then my impatience is going to get the best of me.
 
bitty417 said:
Thanks mward!

I'm thoroughly caught up on all of those threads .. been monitoring them for some time now. I'm going to give it until next week -- no later. If I don't see a refresh by then my impatience is going to get the best of me.
Click to expand...

I don't blame you at all for being impatient. I can relate to the way you feel, in fact! I bought my Mac Pro this summer (well, my university bought it for me, of course..... I'm a professor), but I didn't see any need to keep waiting. I would still be waiting, because we haven't seen a Mac Pro update in a long time.

So I'm glad that I made the leap when I did.

If you can't wait to see what happens in January, I don't blame you. I think that an update is very likely in January, but then you might have to wait awhile for the systems to be available/shipped (who knows?). So it's up to you.

You sound like you are quite well-informed. So good luck with your decision.
 
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