Mac Pro....anything new in the pipeline?

[Kunisawa]

I'm all set to buy a Mac Pro.
(quad 2.66, 12gb ram, 4tb hd, gt 120)

It's all priced out and ready to go. I don't HAVE to buy it right now (want to), and I know the Mac Pro is 30 days away from hitting their average refresh cycle.

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com//#Mac_Pro

So, you guys that understand the CPU roadmap...is it likely that anything drastically better will come out in the next month or two?

Does any of that Lynnfield stuff affect the Mac Pro future?

Or will Snow Leopard make the 8-core Pro power more usable? If I could count on 2x the power, I'd buy it. Sadly, it seems like for my uses, 4-core is the way to go.

E

 

[michael.lauden]

let me help you:

https://buyersguide.macrumors.com//#Mac_Pro

read this ^

copied directly from your post.

 

[TheStrudel]

Well, according to the roadmap, we can't expect anything before 2010, and therefore nothing drastically better is likely to come out in the next month or two. That said, the 2009 Mac Pro was a bit disappointing in terms of price/performance and there are various issues with it that will hopefully be corrected in the next model.

At this time, it is unlikely that Lynnfield will affect the Mac Pro (which is a bit more traditional than the other Macs), but we have no way of knowing.

Snow Leopard does make an octocore Mac Pro more effective because it is explicitly designed (Grand Central Dispatch, OpenCL, etc.) to take advantage of the hardware. But that itself is meaningless unless the applications in question are coded to take advantage of Snow Leopard's technologies.

One reason worth waiting is that it might not be so expensive to get an octocore Mac Pro on the next revision. If you tell us what you'd do with it, we can better advise you.

Oh, also, don't buy your hard drives from . Waste of money. Much cheaper to buy them from a third party and install yourself.

 

[macinfojunkie]

At the bottom end of the Mac Pro lineup - which is about where I'm looking too, I doubt there'll be anything revolutionary in the next few months. Even if there is a minor refresh in the next couple of months - and the linup could so with an update - best I'd expect to see that machine get the next step up in CPU speed for the same price or a few $100s off the price and/or more RAM/HD and maybe a small bump in graphics. There's nothing really out there GPU wise that they could add that you can't add aftermarket anyway. Further up the product line they could of course add the 3.33Ghz chips, but that'll be a whole lot more cash than the system you listed, so won't make any difference to your (or my) purchase plans it would seem.

Personally I'm waiting for Snow Leopard and the drivers to stabilise before I pull the trigger as much as I'm waiting for a spec bump. Then again the longer I wait into 2010 then I might was well wait for the new ones to arrive. That's really once you'll know for sure. When they are up on the Apple website. If you buy on day one, you'll know that you have the longest period until they are replaced/out of date..... but then again you run the risk of experiencing the pleasures that usually go along with the impressive quality control that's lavished on the first batch out of the factory. So you'll probably want to wait until the first recall has taken place too

Oh and as far as the Product Guide goes. It is nothing more than a guess. I was watching it closely in the run up to the 9/9/9 event - God knows why you'd expect one would have learnt by now that those events are a waste of time for anything except toys - The advice banner seems to be nothing more a function of the average refresh days. So there's not a huge amount to be gained from the status. @ 189 days it was neutral, at 191 days it was don't buy. Did anything materially change in those two days?. Nope! So spouting off to go look at that is just dumb if you ask me, especially when someone included the link which they would obviously have looked at before posting. But that's just viewpoint.

Personally I'd like to see the following:

BTO 285 GPU (or better)
Blu Ray Drive (been done to death in other threads, but what the heck).
Bootcamp support for RAID card
2.66 8-Core for similar money to 2.26Ghz today.
more RAM as standard - and put more slots in the 4-core! Mobo!

Oh and update the 30'' display FFS.