Question About Useful Lifetime of the Current Mac Pros

[newton213]

Another thing to keep in mind, because we've got Intel processors in our Macs now, it's a lot easier to upgrade those, too, WITHOUT having to buy from a custom CPU upgrading company. I read a great article about how when Intel introduced the new Clovertown Xeon chips, these guys just popped them in their Mac Pro, lickity split. As easy as driving down to a PC shop and picking them up, just like any PC user. Now, I don't mean to be simplifying the process or anything, but it's pretty cool to be able to do that down the road now. Standards can be a good thing, when the stuff you use is part of the standard.

http://www.hardmac.com/articles/70/ This is the CPU upgrade article.

 

[flappo]

as soon as the new mac pro's come out , mines going in the nearest skip

that extra 170mhz will revolutionise my life , i'm sure of it

 

[astrostu]

It seems folks are split as to whether the improvements to processors really are slowing and will continue to slow, or whether the software will simply continue to get more and more bloated (remember when PhotoShop would install with room to spare on an 80 MB hard drive?) and "need" more speed to run.

I suppose that a more concise way of asking the original question (though I guess it's too late) is: In 5-6 years, will today's Mac Pros seem as outdated as the G4s from 6 years ago do today?

$50 bucks in a cookie jar every month is a good way to have new shiny Macs on your desktop evry couple of years without pain

That's what I've been doing since June 2006 - putting $50 each week into a virtual account in Quicken to be able to afford a new Mac Pro ... whenever they come out.


As to whether or not I "need" the Mac Pro, I take objection to the whole "unless it produces billable hours, you don't need it." If I had a Mac Pro (which is what I convinced my advisor to get me for work, though a bottom-tier one (2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM) because money was tight) in my apartment, then I would be able to work from home when I "need" to. But I also do a lot of arithmetic image processing (anyone heard of IDL?) for my astrophotography which eats up anywhere from 5-20 GB hard drive space on a single project, about 4-5 GB of RAM, and takes over 8 hrs on my PB G4. I don't "need" a Mac Pro, but it would make stuff like that go much faster and allow me more freedom to work on the final product rather than the process of getting the final product.

 

[Sean Dempsey]

I don't "need" a Mac Pro, but it would make stuff like that go much faster and allow me more freedom to work on the final product rather than the process of getting the final product.

Actually, it sounds like you do need a Mac Pro.

 

[tuartboy]

I don't think we've gotten to this point yet, but I bet it's coming sooner rather that later. I mean, the more core's you have the more resources it takes to divy up the info, right? So how many processors can a machine have before they stop improving performance? There's got to be a limit somewhere, right?

It seems like that's a pretty interesting question....

Law of diminishing returns. It really depends on how much your task can be "parallelized" and how good your scheduler is at divvying tasks. Many tasks on my quad-core MP take up all 4 cores and can keep going in many cases I'm sure (Aperture, encoding, etc...)

Fortunately, we don't have to make our decisions only based on need. There's want, as well. In reality, we only need 3 things: water, food, shelter.

You are completely ignoring the fact that many of us rely upon our systems to put food and water on the table.

Because they hate the beach ball?

Sadly, I get as many beach balls on my top-of-the-line MP as on my 12" PB. Fast processors and memory subsystem can't help fix a sleeping hard drive or nasty network disconnect.

Do you think Apple will come out with a 32 core machine for $4,000?

Yes, and likely within 3 years. It has long been believed in computing circles that scaling out, not up, is the future.

Honestly, if it can handle HD video editing and high res photography, what more can the developers throw at it anytime soon?

Until I never have to wait for anything and the computer only waits for me, there is always a more efficient solution. How many days/weeks/months of my life have been spent waiting for a render or batch processing session to finish?

 

[SDDave2007]

I am a computer systems analyst, and work mostly with Win boxes, Unix boxes and such.... at home I recently switched to a MacPro, a machine which is in my opinion one of the best designed, most elegant pieces of hardware I have ever worked with.

What amazes me is how people equate their computers (be it a Mac or other) to a car. "Oh my, my Mac is a year old, and its obsolete".... "Oh my, my car has 100,000 miles on it and its dead". Thats crap... Ask your self this...

Does your computer still perform the tasks that you bought it for originally? Of course the answer is YES... Computers basically don't "wear out", yeah yeah... they do break down, hard drives do fail... but they don't start to slow down, smoke, leak oil etc...

Did a better processor come out the day after you bought your machine? Probably... but that event in no way had any affect on the machine you purchased. THAT machine still does what it did, and still does it just as fast as it did.

And if the machine you bought (as I did) is a MacPro, you know its a screamer today, will be a screamer tommorow and the day after. It has one heck of an upgrade path.... 32gig of RAM, 4 Hard Disk Bays [6 or more if you want to "cheat"], the CPUs can be swapped out for future ones...

 

[Sun Baked]

Now that the price of memory has dropped to $5500 for 32GB of RAM, the machine is a steal and will last quite awhile.

If you are running CPU/GPU intensive stuff, it won't last long -- but for the average heavy user these form factors tend to last quite awhile.

 

[Glenn Wolsey]

Quick questions, will the current Mac Pro run any of the new processors rumored to be included in the "new" Mac Pro's? It'd be nice to know I could put a 3.16Ghz 8 Core chip in down the line.

 

[ricgnzlzcr]

I'm trying to predict that one too Glenn. I saw that anandtech was able to replace their quad-core mac and make it an 8-core mac. What I really wish I knew was whether that's the end of the line for processor upgrades in the future or will mac pro users be able to upgrade even further down the Xeon line.

 

[Umbongo]

Quick questions, will the current Mac Pro run any of the new processors rumored to be included in the "new" Mac Pro's? It'd be nice to know I could put a 3.16Ghz 8 Core chip in down the line.

I'm trying to predict that one too Glenn. I saw that anandtech was able to replace their quad-core mac and make it an 8-core mac. What I really wish I knew was whether that's the end of the line for processor upgrades in the future or will mac pro users be able to upgrade even further down the Xeon line.

Harpertown processors will be socket compatible with the current Mac Pros, but the move to Nehalem will see a new socket.

 

[product26]

are you saying that you had the 733mhz quicksilver?
if so, that computer was out dated when you bought it. (No L3 Cache)
Trust me, I had the exact same one. I upgraded it to 867 (with L3 cache) and then to a dual 1ghz (w/L3 cache).

I recently purchased the base MacPro and couldn't be happier!
I did purchase an extra gig of ram, and a PC X1900XT that i flashed.

The nice thing is that upgrading a mac pro has much more potential than upgrading an older G4. Personally I will probably not need to upgrade for a couple more years. Even then I probably won't NEED to, I will only end up doing it because the parts will be much cheaper.

 

[crees!]

I bought my desktop way back in 2001, 2 weeks before the "Quicksilver" model was released (which is why I now read rumor sites). I felt that it was relatively out of date within a year, and I definitely started to tax it processor-wise within about 2 or 3 years. I taxed it RAM-wise within a year, upgraded, taxed it again within a year, upgraded, and I just gave in and bought some cheap RAM to get it to the max 1.5 GB (from 896 MB I had it).

My question comes from reading several threads recently where people have said something to the effect of, "I just bought my Mac Pro and even though it's effectively a year-old machine, I don't think I'll need to upgrade for a long time."

I have a 4-year old PowerBook and see no need to upgrade at the moment. I do graphics, web programming, and occasional video work on it. Now, compare that to a current MacPro; I don't see any reason why it wouldn't "last" long.

 

[astrostu]

are you saying that you had the 733mhz quicksilver?
if so, that computer was out dated when you bought it. (No L3 Cache)
Trust me, I had the exact same one. I upgraded it to 867 (with L3 cache) and then to a dual 1ghz (w/L3 cache).

No, it was 733 MHz Digital Audio ... bought 2 weeks before they introduced the first QuickSilver model.