"640k of RAM is enough for anyone"
That quote is always so safe and effective....but seriously, expandability never hurt anyone. It improves the machines useful lifespan, if nothing else.
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The 2009 (Gainestown) Mac Pro: Everything We Know
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"640k of RAM is enough for anyone"
That quote is always so safe and effective....but seriously, expandability never hurt anyone. It improves the machines useful lifespan, if nothing else.
24GB is enough for the foreseeable furture
Why not 1TB of RAM to last you a life time?
I'm thinking in terms of systems engineering, not appearance. A few modifications due to custom specs can make a significant difference. Risers, repositioning the CPU sockets for additional PCIe socket length, and the location of the ODD_SATA ports would. Then there's the color selection of the solder mask and silk screen legend.
Add in a few other changes, such as firmware, and possibly a different component here and there (i.e. NIC chip, etc), and you have a custom board that physically resembles nothing else made by the same company, but is still very similar as far as a schematic diagram (not layout). Modified reference design. I guess it depends on how you look at it; schematic, or final product.
I agree that more expansion is better, but a product manager has to make trade-offs... 6 DIMM slots, 12 DIMM slots, 18 DIMM slots... all have trade-offs associated with them.
So what's the most RAM anyone here would consider running in their MP?
6GB for me.
To be quite honest, I didn't know what you meant. You said the "holes are too small to pull enough air thru" and that is all I had to go on.
Looking at the image, it is impossible to tell if the ratio of open area to closed area is less, the same, or greater. We would need to see a closeup of the pattern to know for sure.
S-
I actually disagree. Air, as any fluid, has viscosity and is also subject to friction. This means that the smaller the holes get, the greater the overall area of holes vs solid to achieve the same capacity of flow. Air particle size is virtually irrelevant... besides, which part of 'air' are you referring too? Oxygen, Nitrogen, CO2... etc etc?
Oh, and it is pretty easy to see from that image that the overall area of holes is significantly less than the current design, not to mention the fact they are smaller...
What is interesting is I can't find either board on ASUSs website at all. I was wanting to see if the colors meant anything. I would assume they have to do with the on board RAID, but am not positive.
Just wondering, is there any reason why a 285 or 295 graphics card is off the table?
I know that Apple has historically used lower end cards (except the pro option). Apple products aren't game machines, they are for digital lifestyle, or work. But CSS4 (and similar apps) now use CUDA. CUDA (or openCL - the big feature in SL) is a pretty huge deal, and a good graphics card will give a lot of bang for your buck.
Given how good GPUs are at handling graphics, and given how much better a 295 is than the 260, would a single socket i7 with a 295 be able to run CSS as fast or faster than a dual socket Gainstown MacPro with a 260?
I know that Apple has historically used lower end cards (except the pro option). Apple products aren't game machines, they are for digital lifestyle, or work. But CSS4 (and similar apps) now use CUDA. CUDA (or openCL - the big feature in SL) is a pretty huge deal, and a good graphics card will give a lot of bang for your buck.
Given how good GPUs are at handling graphics, and given how much better a 295 is than the 260, would a single socket i7 with a 295 be able to run CSS as fast or faster than a dual socket Gainstown MacPro with a 260?
So far, Apple has never used high end consumer cards. You may be able to get the GT200 core through Apple maybe offering a quardo card, but that will be about it. It is mostly due to Apple's insistence on including video drivers as apart of the OS and not as a separate downloadable. While this makes for better stability it also means features a card can do go unused for a long time. Plus since Apple only updates video drivers every once and a while new cards are made unusable (where as on a PC at least you get some sort of basic compatibility mode). The ones they do write are for specific cards, which seems silly because if Apple were using OpenGL you should be able to use any card.
I believe it is a case of Apple not needing to offer a large range of GPUs to sell systems to the customers they are targetting. There are downsides to offering more options for Apple, though they may seem irrelevant to us as consumers wanting choice. The 295 is basically ruled out as they would need SLI drivers (I believe) which don't seem like something Apple are willing to deal with.
Maybe we will see things change with the change in role of the GPU, but I wouldn't expect anything this year.
I guess it depends what you consider high end. The 7800GT (G5), 1900XT and 8800GT were in the high end bracket of cards as defined by the manufacturers at the time of release. They just weren't the highest end in those brackets, which makes sense as such cards have a huge premium for little performance gain.
32GB. HDR Photoshop, 3D animation and multi track audio with lots of synths.
Yes, and the reason the iMacs I sell have two generation old ATI 2600 video cards in them. And quite frankly, my customers could care less. I care. Which is why I won't buy one.
Just some areas. I would say CUDA/OpenCL and SLI/Crossfire (for non-games at least) are. Those areas are ones that could see Apple change their current ideology towards the GPU.
No it wouldn't. In fact it would be totally pointless. SLI/Crossfire allow the cards to work together to render scenes faster. OpenCL allows the use of the cards for general purpose computing: it can already use multiple cards rather like having multiple CPUs: it doesn't need SLI or Crossfire support.
True, Apples biggest problem is they write drivers for specific cards versus using the family of cards.
OpenCL like OpenGL would only be able to handle multiple cards (in SLI or otherwise) if the OS is aware of the cards, just because Snow Leopard has OpenCL doesn't mean that the GTX 295 is all of a sudden going to start working. It doesn't work now and OpenGL has been able to support SLI since it first came back (read: a while).
At an OS level the OSX is aware of the cards. OpenCL is designed to scale across the cards by default; OpenGL is not: the drivers "trick" OpenGL (and DirectX) into thinking that they pair (or more) of cards are actually one card. OpenCL doesn't need this.
At a hardware level the system knows there is a card in it. At an OS level it know there is a card in it. It doesn't know what the card is thus the OS either doesn't boot or it kernel panics. Or is Apple finially getting with the time and providing a generic driver that any GPU would run with a la Windows?
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