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What a beauty! Too bad I can't afford one. But don't worry junk producers Dell and HP are sure to follow with an imitation design that runs Windows.

-Mike
 
Ordered mine today but not getting it until Feb.2014, Next purchase 4K displays
 

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What a beauty! Too bad I can't afford one. But don't worry junk producers Dell and HP are sure to follow with an imitation design that runs Windows.

-Mike

Never going to happen, and calling the workstations from HP and Dell crappy is just a bad.

We aren't talking about their cheap $300 towers and TN panel displays here, we're talking about workstations that Apple has yet to unseat and service contracts that are industry leading.

Now, as far as them copying the idea, there's really no need. They don't make anywhere near the amount of money on them, but they are selling towers just fine.
 
Exactly. I think most of the people complaining about expandability are coming from the "hot rod" tradition, not professional users. You don't "mod" a pro appliance, you buy what you need and drive it hard until it depreciates, then replace it. You're not getting paid for your ability to swap PCI cards.

well, you can fix it too. which is, to me, the most important aspect of being able to swap parts if you're using the computer in a working environment..

blow a gpu, walk down to the store and get a new one, go back and install-- back to work in under an hour... instead off drop of at the shop and pick it up a few days later..

i've done it twice with mp1 (with gpus-- obviously some other things too (drives/ram)).. and in both scenarios, it was pretty valuable that i was able to do it.. and both times i got 'upgrades' simply because better gpus were available by then at lower costs.
 
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This swappable CPU is great news. Now I can probably just get the 4-core and live with that until the prices drop way down on the upgrades. With swappable parts, I don't have to pony up as much up front, which is tough enough on my budget. The 4-core will smoke my current machine anyway.

That being said, I'm surprised Apple set base prices as high as they did. KNOWING that people can swap certain parts, I would think that they would be more aggressive with lower pricing to get people to buy more powerful systems from the get go. Everything I read about swapping parts, makes me want to do the opposite.

I keep reading "you can't build this for less", but that is such a stupid statement. No, I can't build for less, but Apple certainly can. They pay a tiny fraction for these parts that retailers sell them for. I work in retail, I see this every day. Apple could have made base prices lower, but they didn't. I'm not saying that the base prices are too high, but they don't make me want to upgrade NOW, especially knowing that I can do it myself for much cheaper not so far down the road.
 
This swappable CPU is great news. Now I can probably just get the 4-core and live with that until the prices drop way down on the upgrades. With swappable parts, I don't have to pony up as much up front, which is tough enough on my budget. The 4-core will smoke my current machine anyway.

that's sort of risky.. the quad is going to be super sweet in most situations.. popping in a 12core after you're used to the 4core might feel like a downgrade.

(unless, of course, you're completely positive about your software/workflow and know more cores are going to ease deadlines etc.)
 
Really, really.....

good news. I hope to see someone so bold to make a DIY upgrade exploiting this design feature....:D

But we must know for now, that upgrade can truthfully void your warranty...And dont seems to me as something Apple-allowed......:eek:

The tinkerer in me really likes this discovery....The practical one does not find a way to justify a expense of 3000+ USD to prove a point......:(.....:confused:....

:):apple:
 
But we must know for now, that upgrade can truthfully void your warranty...And dont seems to me as something Apple-allowed......:eek:

that's not true.. if you try to swap a cpu and break something in the process, that damage will not be covered under warranty..

if you successfully swap a cpu with 1 year left on applecare, you'll still have 1year applecare.. your warranty doesn't void out.
 
Seriously, 'Apologies'? To whom? Apple? Phil Schiller? Perhaps these people could make an offering at the Steve Jobs altar you keep in your basement in order to appease... you, I guess?

'Apologies', for making an assumption about a tech product. Like, someone's feelings were hurt. Wow.

Go Back to Your Homeground, Troll !

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I think the real story here is that OWC beat ifixit with the first Mac Pro tear down.

Good One.
 
Regarding GPU upgrades - it's not a problem to build a GPU card with whatever chip one would like that will fit in nMP. The problem is how to get proper driver support in OS X. It would have to be nVidia or AMD themselves making sure drivers are available. Otherwise just wait for the 2nd Gen nMP that will no doubt come with new GPUs with drivers baked into OS X and will most likely use the same GPU card format, so you can buy that and put in your 1st Gen nMP. And of course anyone could make 3rd party GPU card using any of the already supported GPUs - at the moment that's the 3 AMD FirePro's - the question is, can the 3rd party one significantly undercut Apple's original in order to make it worth the trouble of designing it?
 
I would suspect even if Apple were to embrace a wider variety of graphics cards, there'd be no nvidea option until Adobe etc have fully embraced opencl. By making the pro machines CUDAless, Apple is sending a pretty clear message about the technologies they want developers using.

It'll be interesting to see how long it is before people start trying to install two of the graphics cards with the ssd chip on them to see if both will work.
 
I dont think in after effects, premiere rendering or cinema 4d it would be slower..

depends.. the 12 core is obviously going to be faster during the actual render but you're not physiically sitting there during that time.. the time you personally work-- modeling, texturing, etc... you're mostly going to be on a single core and a faster clock will give you a faster/smoother drawing experience.
 
So basically get the 4 core base model with a d500 or d700 and the 512gb ssd.

Then, buy the Intel Xeon E5-2697v2 12 core somewhere for around 2100 €
Then buy the 64gb Ram kit at OWC for 850 $ = 650 €

Get the d500, 12 core, 512gb, 64gb Mac Pro with edu discount for:
6150 €

Would that be doable?? Is the cpu upgrade doable for someone who has only once upgraded the cpu back in his pentium 4 tower :D ?
 
It'll be interesting to see how long it is before people start trying to install two of the graphics cards with the ssd chip on them to see if both will work.

possible i guess but not likely without some serious modifications.. notice the two gpus are different in both arrangement/amount of capacitors etc.
as well as the two screw holes up top are on opposing sides... as in- it doesn't look like you can put gpu A in place of gpu B and have the proper connectors lining up to their corresponding sockets.
 
depends.. the 12 core is obviously going to be faster during the actual render but you're not physiically sitting there during that time.. the time you personally work-- modeling, texturing, etc... you're mostly going to be on a single core and a faster clock will give you a faster/smoother drawing experience.

Can't speak for C4D, but for Lightwave you are spot on. Part of why I settled on the hex core as the best compromise for me between animating and rendering (which will use all 12 threads and all the RAM I can throw at it). I'm actually not that excited about the OpenCL stuff, it'll be forever before NewTek ever supports it.
 
depends.. the 12 core is obviously going to be faster during the actual render but you're not physiically sitting there during that time.. the time you personally work-- modeling, texturing, etc... you're mostly going to be on a single core and a faster clock will give you a faster/smoother drawing experience.

well, very very often I do ram previews or will just render a single frame in c4d just to see how something I'm trying will look like, so I am sitting there... though I agree actually sometiems I turn multicore in afx off for ram preview, in that case you'd be right.

What's the exact name of the 8 core cpu one would have to buy if I wanted to upgrade it myself by the way :) ?
 
Would that be doable?? Is the cpu upgrade doable for someone who has only once upgraded the cpu back in his pentium 4 tower :D ?

probably doable, sure..
just judging off the past, most people don't upgrade cpus.. the people who do are the people that will be picking up cheaper used quads in 3years and putting 12core upgrades in it which, by then, will also be cheaper..

we're talking about a very very small group of people though.

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well, very very often I do ram previews or will just render a single frame in c4d just to see how something I'm trying will look like, so I am sitting there... though I agree actually sometiems I turn multicore in afx off for ram preview, in that case you'd be right.

well, i'm not saying youre wrong so it's not so much about me trying to be right..
the first post i wrote about this included something like "unless you really know your needs"..

i'm just speaking more in general and what i generally see is people tending to think "12core is a lot more expensive so it must be better".. i mean, it makes sense when applied to standard consumerism lines of thoughts..
it's just that in this case, there the possibility of spending a lot more money in the name of 'better' when your usage won't even take advantage of the additional cores -- and worse yet, having 12 cores might actually negatively affect your experience..

anyway.. a quickie little thought earlier is turning into walls of words.. not my intent.. signing off. :)
 
Interesting point you raise there.

Do you think that Apple would have preferred to keep the upgradability to a minimum just like with the iMac but manufacturing necessities outweighed their original intent?

If this was the case they could have gone with proprietary everything including sockets and connections to achieve the same goal, right?

I am still wondering what's going to happen to the next Intel CPU socket, will it be compatible with this generation of MacPros?

Like I said before, interesting theory you got there.


To carry this thread forward, just because something Apple does benefits Apple doesn't mean it's bad for us. I think it's likely to be helpful that the MacPro is modular. If they want to upgrade a component without a complete remake of the machine, they can do it at very little expense. It may be too much to ask, but perhaps we'll see them go back to a more reasonable upgrade schedule (not 1,500 days between updates :eek:
 
that's never going to happen :)

they'll just act like they never said such&such and move on to the next thing to complain about..

;)

Its not going to happen, because that’s not what most of us where even saying. You might have wished that, but it wasn’t true, if you were listening.

The fact that you could take out the CPU and that it would be in a socket was expected. Few that I remember thought it would be soldered on the board. The question that remains is how easy is it to actually do the teardown, get a new CPU in without breaking anything, does it work and can the average user that might do this once or twice in a decade preform it. The pictures from OWC don’t show that. iFixit will probably be out in a week or so, at which point we’ll know for sure.
 
Sure replacements might be pricy, but the price will come down in years to come. I can put two quad core Xeons (X5365) for $100-$200. A few years ago it was over $1000 just for ONE X5365 CPU. Simply put you can buy more time down the road.

I did just that, upgraded to X5365's in my mac pro went from a 4 core to an 8 with no problems. So I agree. just looked at the prices on server supply and for the E5-2697 v2 12 core there currently $2740. So they will have to come down but they will. I purchased my X5365's for 200 each.
Never been happier.
 
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