Mac Pro shipping
The Intel-based Mac Pro desktop machines are shipping. There's a review at MacInTouch.
It sounds great, but, in my humble opinion, there are some disappointments:
It sounds great, but, in my humble opinion, there are some disappointments:
...it requires special FB-DIMM memory that costs twice as much as the standard types of RAM used in the iMac Core Duo and MacBooks – and not many memory vendors carry these FB-DIMMs yet.
[The hyperlink is mine.] And that's in the US, so I assume they're non-existent in Australia. The article seemed to suggest this was tied to Intel Xeons in particular, rather than being a design decision made by Apple.The Mac Pro's standard display card is a GeForce 7300 GT. This is an entry-level card, designed by nVidia for undemanding users of older games and basic multimedia. Walk into CompUSA or Best Buy and you can find it for about $80.
[The hyperlink is mine.] This is almost inexplicable. (Actually, it's entirely explicable—it reduces the cost. But a $US 80 card in a machine that starts at $A 4,000?) On the Australian Apple Store site, it notes that "Selecting the ATI Radeon X1900 XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 may delay the shipment of your Mac Pro." Great!We're curious to see if retail, non-Mac specific ATI and nVidia video cards will work on Mac Pros with Apple's built-in Mac OS X drivers.
I'd be curious, too. Second-tier graphics cards for PC systems usually only cost a couple of hundred dollars.- On performance:
One exception is gaming. The Mac Pro lags far behind Windows PCs, turning in Doom3 timedemo frame rates half that of PCs running the same video hardware and slower processors.
It's not like I play many games, but I play a couple. And it's not like their graphics requirements are monumental, either, but I am hoping I can make a Mac Pro my next desktop system, and dual-boot into Windows XP for any residual Windows-bound tasks. This will include playing EVE Online. We haven't yet tested Boot Camp. Apple hasn't finished preparing all the drivers for Windows XP yet, but field reports indicate that most can be gathered on the Internet from the original suppliers and work reasonably well.
Yikes. I think I'll sit it out until they get that sorted, then.
It is an expensive purchase. Do you have any idea how much cheaper it would be to do an equiv. whitebox, still with dual Xeons?
ReplyDeleteThe video card decision is odd and the only review of the system I'd read before this didn't delve into that.
What do people buy high-end macs for? It's probably too expensive to be a home unit but what business needs would have you have? Graphic artists, Apple-based development, maybe publishing.
I haven't priced an equivalent whitebox, no, though Xeons aren't cheap, and the last time I looked into it, dual-CPU motherboards aren't cheap either. Despite what I wrote in the main article, I suspect $A 4,000 wouldn't be far off the mark.
ReplyDeleteAgain, if the price mentioned in the review I was quoting ($US 80) is correct, that's a really low-end card. Even if it can hold up to basic, even average usage of a desktop Mac, I still don't get it—everything else in the specification is pretty high-end.
I'm having a bit of trouble believing that the game would run at half the speed, given that it's exactly the same hardware.
ReplyDeleteThe only thought that comes to mind is perhaps additional latency when accessing RAM, but I would need to see more reviews or test it myself before really believing there is a problem.
I expect that he actually tested the game playing with the crappy video card, which makes it amazing that it was only half the speed rather than being a problem.
It is unknowably insane of Apple to land that turd of a card in their beautiful box.
FWIW at WWDC they said the same spec box from dell was a $1000 more expensive than the mac pro.
ReplyDelete