Mac Pro For Gaming

[Dont Hurt Me]

No matter how much we want Apple won't release a gaming mac. It's just not their market. They want to build computers for Joe Average, and Joe Cool who owns a music business or an engineering firm. These people don't play games.

The only reason I can see Apple putting really high end GPUs in macs is if nVidia port CUDA to OSX - or AMD do the same with their equivilant. These things do work.

As far as Apple thinks we ought to have enough fun making home movies or photo albums.

"Yeah, woo, look at me process this set of images from Grandma's birthday" vs "BOOM - Headshot"

1 shoe doesnt fit everyone. Apple should offer a Gpu upgrade for every line. Im saying a Gpu bump & stop the Mac vs Mac crippling.

 

[toru173]

Not for years. Also, gamers are willing to spend 2K+ for a machine (need I cite XPS and Alienware?), and the 1.3K you're quoting is amazingly optimistic for those hardware req's, not to mention the fact that it'd completely screw with the iMac line sales.

I dunno. Those specs are at the low end of a "gaming" rig - I'd bump the processor and the video card, and that could easily put another grand on the price. Then you have exotic things like water cooling and a high end PSU to add to the mix - not to mention exotic (read: Blu-ray or HD-DVD) optical drives. All in all I think the price Irishman quoted for that hardware isn't unreasonable.

 

[Irishman]

I dunno. Those specs are at the low end of a "gaming" rig - I'd bump the processor and the video card, and that could easily put another grand on the price. Then you have exotic things like water cooling and a high end PSU to add to the mix - not to mention exotic (read: Blu-ray or HD-DVD) optical drives. All in all I think the price Irishman quoted for that hardware isn't unreasonable.

Thank you.

 

[Hennesie2000]

All I know is that I have pretty much fried my ATI x1900xt while gaming under boot camp WinXP and apple wont do anything about it because I can't reproduce the result in OSX.


Playing even older games like RTCW at 300fps causes artifacts and eventually it will lock up. Games like Half-Life 2 that I used to be able to play at maxed-out setting now barely run for 2 mins before the vid card locks up and the computer restarts. Let me know if you have any ideas on a remedy for this.

 

[erickkoch]

Sounds like your card may be overheating, an unfortunate but common problem withe the X1900 cards. If it's not already damaged you might try installing an Accelero cooling unit to replace the one you have. They are about $20. This has been discussed many times on these forums.

Click here, at the bottom of the post is a pic I posted after I installed the cooling unit. I've had it about 4 months and never had any problems. It also runs much quieter than the old cooling fan.

Here

 

[Hennesie2000]

Sounds like your card may be overheating, an unfortunate but common problem withe the X1900 cards. If it's not already damaged you might try installing an Accelero cooling unit to replace the one you have. They are about $20. This has been discussed many times on these forums.

Click here, at the bottom of the post is a pic I posted after I installed the cooling unit. I've had it about 4 months and never had any problems. It also runs much quieter than the old cooling fan.

Here

I noticed in your pic that your card is not in the bottom slot....should that help with cooling? My guess is it would so maybe i should try that. I have read about the Accelero X2 before but everyone said it didn't really improve cooling...maybe I'm wrong.

I don't think it is damaged....at least I hope it is not because of ATI's Catalyst Control Center..I do have the option selected that shuts the card down if there is any error or heat issue.

 

[AC773]

The other problem with the Mac Pro and gaming is the memory - those FB-DIMMs are far slower than DDR2.

All I'm asking for is a machine with the following:

-Desktop Core2 Duo chip
-2.5" hard drive with space for at least one more
-PCI Express x16 slot for a decent video card
-DDR2 800 memory

At this point I don't really care what the price would be; they just need something without a monitor between the Mac mini and Pro. Is that too much to ask?

There's the argument by some on MR that the best thing to do is to use a Mac for work and a Windows machine for games. I don't know, that just sounds like a big waste of money to me - 2 computers to do the job that 1 should do. It'd also suck to think of all that computing power tied up in my gaming machine that I could be using for my Mac.

Here's to hoping that MacWorld '08 brings something interesting.