whats the eSATA thing ? I missed that one
There's been reports of problems with SIL3132 based cards here and there (hard to nail the issue down, as others got them working on different models), but after the Marvell 6.0Gb/s cards came out, some couldn't get those to work properly either.
From information available, it seems the 2009 systems with
B08 firmware are the offending systems. Except for an offer to at least one person to downgrade it back to B07, there's no fix or any information publicly released from what I've seen/heard of. As it's unknown as to what B08 may offer, there's hesitancy to do this vs. issues that exist with earlier firmware.
downsides to PCs are still the interface ? also the color management is not as good ? and not going to get into it
but Macs are still better at color management ? things are changing in some ways but the other side is not for me but many in the creative industry is they are not tech savy dont want to be dealing with virus and other isses are a pain so TOC is still better with Macs for some since they can figure most things out themselves ?
I've never used it (wouldn't know what I'm doing anyway), and am ony going by information posted by other members that are on the fence. Most seemed to be commenting on video suites IIRC, but for photo work, maybe they were more accustomed to the issues/willing to deal with it, doesn't affect them as much if at all (i.e. don't touch it), and don't do color management (I do recall that OS X is better for this has been mentioned a time or two before).
the fact adobe needs to get off their ! and rebuild PS from the ground up to take better advantage of more cores ?
so for the photographer a huge market share of the now small side of apple ! in the Mac Pro offerings are two machines really ! the 3.2 quad and the 6 core 3.3 ?
the video guys are OK
From what gets posted, it definitely seems like Adobe isn't putting the developer time into it.
Why has this market shrunk do you think?
Is this related to the reduction in printed materials?
its not the prices so much for me ? since a quality XEON workstation from Dell or HP is about the same ? its the fact that the Xeon I think is not needed as much anymore for a quality machine when the parts now for a i7 can be very good ?
Yes, the consumer part quality is decent (i.e i7's and Xeons are the same save ECC when on the same die size).
But traditionally, and it still holds true, the workstation has to be able to accomodate scientists and engineers. That particular type of usage tends to involve software that runs recursive programming (data just generated is now input data for the next run of the process, and so on). So if an error occurs during any part of this, all subsequent data points are incorrect. When you need to depend on the accuracy of that data (i.e. may even have an effect on life and death; think about the computer used to design your car for example), it has to be accurate.
But depending on your usage, this may not be the case at all (more likely actually). Photo/video work doesn't rely on this type of processing, so if a mistake occurs, it doesn't screw up the entire project (i.e. one bad pixel blows the entire animation sequence).
So ECC in such a case isn't a necessity per the application. That doesn't mean it's not nice to have, but it's not critical, nor does it have a negative effect on the final output if you do use it.
But what's more important to realize, is that you didn't have a choice not too long ago. The 2006 - 2008 MP's used CPU's that were tied to FB-DIMM (all that could be used in those systems). This changed with Nehalem (you can run non-ECC memory on the 35xx/55xx and 36xx/56xx Xeons; just don't mix it with ECC).
Given there's no cost difference in the consumer variant of the Xeon, the only cost difference (assuming the rest of the system is identical), would be the cost of the RAM. And for large vendors, they get it at quantity pricing that makes it a negligible increase to the overall cost of the system (same frequency and capacity).
but in the past when I built my PCs and had macs they would end up costing close but I can sell the macs for more
MP's are a niche market in comparison, so the demand for used systems is higher than the supply vs. the PC side.
I've never had any issues like that with non-ECC RAM. I think you're exaggerating. If you need a machine for work and your work requires big renderings, then it's priceless as you don't want your multi hour work to screw up because of RAM problem but as I said, for most of us that is irrelevant.
It all depends on the software you're using. For most users, it wouldn't make a difference.
