There's a Mac Pro on my desk

The mini-saga that was me ordering a Mac Pro is over. There's a Mac Pro on my desk. It is almost certainly the nicest looking computer I have ever owned. It's definitely the fastest, and by far the most expensive. Here's the TNT consignment tracker:
Mac Pro TNT delivery.png
Let me point out the interesting bits.
  • Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.
  • Indeed, I was not at home on 12 February 2008 at 8:19am. I was on my way to work. So was my wife. We have jobs, full-time jobs. I don't recall ever being at home for a courier delivery. Ever. I've driven to the TNT depot twice, and the Australian Air Express depot once this year. I commented on this insanity almost two years ago. For a residential address, what's so hard about calling ahead and negotiating even a rough time estimate?
  • Once you miss a delivery, there's apparently no possibility whatsoever of collecting the package that same day. None. So at 7.59am the following day, I drove to Adelaide Airport for the third time this year. And left with a Mac Pro on the back seat.
I'm planning on a series of posts about various migrations from my decrepit P4 Wintel box to the Mac Pro, as well as managing, for the first time, a laptop and a desktop running the same OS. For now, here's my initial impression: the Mac Pro is fast. It's the snappiest I've seen Mac OS X, which, in my opinion, can be a bit of a dog on my MacBook Pro.

Comments

  1. How noisy is it and what is the hardware config?

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  2. Hi Shaun,

    It's extremely quiet. I've only had a brief look inside the case—there's at least a 12cm diameter intake fan at the front, and a 12cm exhaust fan at the back. They are both very quiet. There's some exhaust coming from the PSU at the back, presumably a smaller fan up there. There may well be a fan on the graphics card (I didn't take a close enough look), and presumably there are fans on the CPUs. So there are at least five fans in it, and it runs quieter than the Pentium 4 Wintel box elsewhere in the room, which I think contains a mere two fans. (I find the stock Intel P4 CPU fans to be ridiculously noisy.) It's about on-par with the P4-based FreeBSD box, uh, also in the same room. (That one is running a third-party heatsink+fan on the CPU and five 8cm diameter case fans.) Okay, enough talking about fans.

    The hardware configuration is modest: dual 2.8 GHz Quad-core Xeons, 4G RAM, 2 x 500G disk (non-RAID—I need to plan a backup solution real soon now), NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, Airport Extreme, one SuperDrive, wired mouse and keyboard. I bought a 23" Cinema HD display at the same time.

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  3. Thanks Paul. I am looking forward to your future comments.

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