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The Wait is Over — MP 8800GT — Your First Impressions

T

TripleCore

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 30, 2007
129
8
So I finally got the box, unpacked it and migrated my account and files over. Got my memory tonight, so soon I'll have 10GB in there.

My first are impressions are highly positive:

1. The biggest difference for me, going from a G5, is that this machine is so quiet, relaxingly quiet. It's nice to give my ear a break from the din of fans.

2. It's snappier overall.

3. It's fast. I rendered a large modo image which took almost nine hours on my old D2.3. On this one, it rendered in 40 minutes! That's 13 times faster!

4. The drives are super easy to insert. Painless. I got a 1TB Seagate on sale from Fry's for $240 so it's now happily inside the tower of power.

5. Love the new keyboard. It is much much better to use than the old ashtray design where the keys would stick.

6. The built-in Bluetooth is very convenient.

7. Very fast to get in sleep mode, and fast to wake.


For those still waiting, I feel the pain. But soon you will get it and will really enjoy this system. The wait is worth it.

What are your impressions?
 
I'm still getting set up, but I'm enjoying it so far. What I am not enjoying is Leopard. :( They made little changes, like in Finder, that are throwing me off. Sorry, had to vent. Anyway, this machine is so quiet I can't even tell if it's on! I just added RAM and a HD and it took me all of 2 minutes.
 
TripleCore said:
So I finally got the box, unpacked it and migrated my account and files over. Got my memory tonight, so soon I'll have 10GB in there.

My first are impressions are highly positive:

1. The biggest difference for me, going from a G5, is that this machine is so quiet, relaxingly quiet. It's nice to give my ear a break from the din of fans.

2. It's snappier overall.

3. It's fast. I rendered a large modo image which took almost nine hours on my old D2.3. On this one, it rendered in 40 minutes! That's 13 times faster!

4. The drives are super easy to insert. Painless. I got a 1TB Seagate on sale from Fry's for $240 so it's now happily inside the tower of power.

5. Love the new keyboard. It is much much better to use than the old ashtray design where the keys would stick.

6. The built-in Bluetooth is very convenient.

7. Very fast to get in sleep mode, and fast to wake.


For those still waiting, I feel the pain. But soon you will get it and will really enjoy this system. The wait is worth it.

What are your impressions?
Click to expand...

How long did your migration take? I really don't want to migrate apps but may have to do so on a few. Any issues there at all? Got my fedex tracking number. Should have my 3.2 by 3pm tomorrow!
 
Okay, here are my first impressions (Mac Pro 8800GT)

1. Besides being the fastest machine I've ever used, I'm going to reserve the rest of the list to nit picky negatives about the machine.

2. Bootcamp was a nightmare to install. For some reason it would not work if I had more than one SATA drive in the system. I had to disconnect all drives, install winxp, then reconnect the drives afterwards.

3. It's extremely hard to max out 8 cores.

4. The SATA drives are really easy to insert, but I almost broke my finger removing the drives. Is there a special technique besides "pull as hard as you can?"

5. The new keyboard arrived DOA.

6. Had an initial sleep reboot problem, but after resetting PRAM, it was working again. HOld on, I'm going to try it again now. whew, it woke again. Sweet

7. Upon rebooting the computer in windows, it would just sit there with a white screen. I'd have to manually power off and then power back on again. Can this be a sign that the bootcamp drivers are still in beta? I think so.

8. 8800GT was not as fast as I had thought it was going to be. Yeah sure, I got 13000 in 3dmark06, but hey, it is stuttering in FSX so I had to adjust to minimize it, but hey, it still stutters!

9. Wireless performance is crap. With my old G5, I had a edimax 802.11n in it and was seeing wireless transfer speeds of 6MB/s. That was cool. Now, with the built in wireless of the mac pro I'm getting 0.5MB/s. WTF? Oh yes, the edimax setup is using external 3 mimo antennas. The internal 802.11n wifi of the macpro is using 2 internal antennas. Booooo apple, booo!

But overall, I'm :)
 
I'm still setting mine up but compared to my Mac Mini it's a beast :D

10.5.2 took forever to install on my mini, it installed in no time on the Mac Pro. Not sure if this is because of the speed, or because the Mac Pro had such a later version of 10.5.1 (probably both of those).

I was expecting the installation of Ram and a Hard Drive to be fairly easy, but it was even easier than I expected. I love that the side panel is so easy to get on and off... I've had plenty of PCs with side panels that are designed to be easy to get in and out of, but none of them compare to this. Especially on a PC where you normally have to position the panel just right before you can slide it in (and then you have to push as hard as you can). With the Mac Pro you just set it in the slot and tilt it up.

The only thing that scared me a little was the lock/unlock latch on the back, it was a little harder to move than I expected (pushing it down took a little force.)

I'm installing Boot Camp on it now to see how some games run in Windows, but I'm pretty sure I'll be fairly impressed.

Everything in OS X is nice and smooth and fast. Having a real hard drive as opposed to a Mac Mini's hard drive (along with everything else of course) makes a world of difference.

I was going to try and migrate things over but decided to just have a clean slate instead. Copied over the files I needed, and that's it.
 
MrPDaddyHimself said:
How long did your migration take? I really don't want to migrate apps but may have to do so on a few. Any issues there at all? Got my fedex tracking number. Should have my 3.2 by 3pm tomorrow!
Click to expand...

About 2.5 hours with FW 800. That was just the user account files. I didn't have enough room for my client files, but I just popped out the 750GB drive and put it into the Mac Pro. Done deal. When the migration assistant finished, it created a new user for me, so to me, that is a bug. What I did was login in to my first admin account and deleted the new admin account.

Peace said:
"The wait is not over"

I ordered my Mac Pro without the 8800 so I could start using it ASAP.

Now I have to "wait" until March to get the card.
Click to expand...

That is unfortunate. I hope you get it earlier. With the systems shipping earlier, I think the cards will too.

ptseng said:
Okay, here are my first impressions (Mac Pro 8800GT)
2. Bootcamp was a nightmare to install. For some reason it would not work if I had more than one SATA drive in the system. I had to disconnect all drives, install winxp, then reconnect the drives afterwards.

4. The SATA drives are really easy to insert, but I almost broke my finger removing the drives. Is there a special technique besides "pull as hard as you can?"

5. The new keyboard arrived DOA.
But overall, I'm :)
Click to expand...

2. That's not good. I am hoping to install VMware or Parallels--hope it goes smoothly.

4. Mine came out pretty easily--maybe it is just how they are set in your unit?

5. My keyboard wouldn't work at all in the Finder, but ok in apps--but this was while I was updating to 10.5.2. Seems fine now. I had a bluetooth keyboard on my G5, but I got tired of waiting for the keyboard to be recognized (poor range/implementation IMO), so I got a USB one this time.
 
I've been trying to download the 10.5.2 update since 4 PM. it keeps pausing over halfway through. So annoying. I hope it's the internet and not my machine.
 
ErikAndre said:
It's the internet... so glad to hear you got your machine. :D
Click to expand...

Thanks. I figured that Apple was probably getting hammered on this. Doesn't help that the install is 343MBs. I still feel bad about the few who remain from the initial orders.
 
Besides my issue with the Crucial ram I ordered, I've had no problems. It's amazingly quiet and fast. I've installed everything without a problem, but I haven't installed Windows yet. No sleep issue.

I was hoping to take advantage of the 8800gt with some of my games. However, I'm only now realizing that most are not universal, so I'm hesitant to install them. COD2 is disappointing. When I maxed it out, the graphics were amazing, but movement was jerky. This jerkiness happens no matter what the video settings are. There must be some kind of fix for this.
 
bensim said:
Besides my issue with the Crucial ram I ordered, I've had no problems. It's amazingly quiet and fast. I've installed everything without a problem, but I haven't installed Windows yet. No sleep issue.

I was hoping to take advantage of the 8800gt with some of my games. However, I'm only now realizing that most are not universal, so I'm hesitant to install them. COD2 is disappointing. When I maxed it out, the graphics were amazing, but movement was jerky. This jerkiness happens no matter what the video settings are. There must be some kind of fix for this.
Click to expand...

The quietness seems to be one of the most mentioned aspects of it. That in combination with the snappiness makes it really feel transparent.

Too bad about the games. I'm not a gamer when I ask is there is a decent variety of universal games? I might look into a few for my new system. Crysis sounds like the have to get game.
 
TripleCore said:
The quietness seems to be one of the most mentioned aspects of it
Click to expand...

I'm shopping for a Mac Pro, mainly because I feel that my G5 Quad is a bit noisy. It doesn't suffer from fans going nuts, it's just the overall sound level that really penetrates my ears, especially late at night when everyone's asleep and everything else is quiet.. And it's still very much quieter than my previous computer, a Dell Dimension 8200... (Yeah, I know!!)

Would those of you that have upgraded from a Quad say that there's a substantial difference in noise levels between a PowerMac Quad and the new Mac Pro? Or is it just noticeable?..

And also: if I mainly use the computer for audio stuff, does that mean that the nVidia 8800's fan spin at minimal speed?..

Thanks.
 
kokocalamar said:
I'm shopping for a Mac Pro, mainly because I feel that my G5 Quad is a bit noisy. It doesn't suffer from fans going nuts, it's just the overall sound level that really penetrates my ears, especially late at night when everyone's asleep and everything else is quiet.. And it's still very much quieter than my previous computer, a Dell Dimension 8200... (Yeah, I know!!)

Would those of you that have upgraded from a Quad say that there's a substantial difference in noise levels between a PowerMac Quad and the new Mac Pro? Or is it just noticeable?..

And also: if I mainly use the computer for audio stuff, does that mean that the nVidia 8800's fan spin at minimal speed?..

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Yes, it's very noticeable! Your ears will like the difference.

I think it will be better for recording. It has a quiet machine hum, which could be the drives. If low ambient sound levels are really important, you could put it in an enclosure. But the sounds from outside are actually louder right now.
 
Mine is a dream. 2X 3.2 GHz, 8GB RAM, 2TB internal storage, and 570GB external storage. I did not have the problems with boot camp that user #1 had. I had all my drives in, and it just asked me to pick one, and how much of it was going to be a windows partition.
 
Brianna said:
Mine is a dream. 2X 3.2 GHz, 8GB RAM, 2TB internal storage, and 570GB external storage. I did not have the problems with boot camp that user #1 had. I had all my drives in, and it just asked me to pick one, and how much of it was going to be a windows partition.
Click to expand...

Boot Camp failed on me, but then I finished upgrading to 10.5.2 and it worked like a charm.
 
first impressions - Mac Geniuses are not geniuses.

my machine is still dead.. sitting in a store, waiting for parts to arrive.

:(

bad first impression.. i'm looking to start over in a week.. hopefully it all goes well from then onwards. :)
 
If a question is allowed in this thread:
What's the reason not to copy all apps form my existing MBP to the new MP ? Is it advisable to set up the individual programs from the scratch?

Thank you for your inputs - My new MP should arrive on monday...
 
MacPeach said:
If a question is allowed in this thread:
What's the reason not to copy all apps form my existing MBP to the new MP ? Is it advisable to set up the individual programs from the scratch?

Thank you for your inputs - My new MP should arrive on monday...
Click to expand...

The reason would be if there are two versions of your application. So far, I only noticed Photoshop CS3 missing a component. I will probably reinstall CS3 over the weekend just to be safe.
 
TripleCore said:
The reason would be if there are two versions of your application. So far, I only noticed Photoshop CS3 missing a component. I will probably reinstall CS3 over the weekend just to be safe.
Click to expand...

Thank you TripleCore!
I have however a hundred of apps installed and belive to use them once in a while ... See attchment... But maybe Im the only one who does not clean up.
Thx!
 

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kokocalamar said:
I'm shopping for a Mac Pro, mainly because I feel that my G5 Quad is a bit noisy. It doesn't suffer from fans going nuts, it's just the overall sound level that really penetrates my ears, especially late at night when everyone's asleep and everything else is quiet.. And it's still very much quieter than my previous computer, a Dell Dimension 8200... (Yeah, I know!!)

Would those of you that have upgraded from a Quad say that there's a substantial difference in noise levels between a PowerMac Quad and the new Mac Pro? Or is it just noticeable?..

And also: if I mainly use the computer for audio stuff, does that mean that the nVidia 8800's fan spin at minimal speed?..

Thanks.
Click to expand...

HUGE Difference. I didn't even realize how quiet it was until I hooked up my old IMac to it (pre-Intel) and it sounded like a jet in comparison. Then went to work today on an older Quad Powermac and the fan was incredibly noisy in comparison. This new MacPro is whisper quiet. One of its best features/pluses.
 
MacPeach said:
Thank you TripleCore!
I have however a hundred of apps installed and belive to use them once in a while ... See attchment... But maybe Im the only one who does not clean up.
Thx!
Click to expand...


Does the Macromedia MX-series work in Leopard?:confused:
 
treehorn said:
HUGE Difference. I didn't even realize how quiet it was until I hooked up my old IMac to it (pre-Intel) and it sounded like a jet in comparison. Then went to work today on an older Quad Powermac and the fan was incredibly noisy in comparison. This new MacPro is whisper quiet. One of its best features/pluses.
Click to expand...

Put it this way, my external drive's little cooling fan is louder than my MacPro while it is encoding video and almost maxed out the CPUs.
Amazing!!!
 
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