Upgradability. (is it even a word?)

[luka]

forgive the ignorance of an owner of a now defective MBP. In light of my machine's desire to pass away into the place where all good souls go, I'm inquiring into the feasibility of this lowly peasant to become a recipient of a glorious mac pro.


I'm curious about the upgradability (it's a word, I'm sure of it...) of the mac pro. I understand the older models have the ability to gorge themselves on tasty new GPU's, but in purchasing a model mid cycle ( 2 months until the average), what are the real chances of being able to retrofit some new, shiny and superior tech into my computational machine? sixty or so days doesn't seem to be the amount of time I'd want to have the top-of-the-line model.

I understand the question to be a purely hypothetical one with no one true answer, so don't feel frightened to speak you opinion on the matter.

As always with me, some tasty cookies and sunshine for the best reply.

 

[Mackilroy]

Except for the processor and the graphics card (you're limited to Apple's video options at the moment unless a. they introduce more, or b. you run the card under Windows) Mac Pros are quite upgradeable. There's room for four hard drives, up to 32GB of RAM, it's easy to add/swap out an optical drive, and there are three free PCIe slots (four total including the slot with the graphics card installed). It's rumored that ATI will be releasing the HD3870 for Macs soon, but nobody knows for certain.

 

[Tallest Skil]

The current Mac Pro is a dead-end CPU-wise. Apple probably won't have backwards compatible GPUs for the current Mac Pro either.

RAM, HDDs, and ODDs. That's about it, futureproof-wise.

 

[zmttoxics]

The current Mac Pro is a dead-end CPU-wise. Apple probably won't have backwards compatible GPUs for the current Mac Pro either.

RAM, HDDs, and ODDs. That's about it, futureproof-wise.

Why not? They should be the same cards. The difference in the cards (as far as I know) between the 2006 and 2008 mac pros is that the new ones are PCIE 2.0 compliant. I see no reason why it wouldn't support other new mac video cards in the future since PCIE 3.0 isn't out till late 2009 early 2010.

Even then, pcie 3.0 cards work in pcie 2 and 1 slots (same with pcie 2 cards in pcie 1 slots). So I am not even sure why they would stop supporting cards for the 2006 model because they are all going to work no matter the bus version.

 

[ventro]

What about buying a 2.8 and then buying a 3.2 processor in a few months or so when the price comes down in time for nehalem? Is that possible?

 

[Tallest Skil]

What about buying a 2.8 and then buying a 3.2 processor in a few months or so when the price comes down in time for nehalem? Is that possible?

You could certainly do that. By "dead-end", I meant that the current socket could not take a Nehalem chip.

In the case of the GPUs, you're probably right. Apple has no reason not to write the firmware for the Nehalem cards in anything but EFI64. Thus, the next set of graphics cards should be backwards compatible with the Penryn Mac Pros.