Mac Pro as next main machine?

Phate

Phate

Phate

Caporegime
Joined
1 Nov 2003
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Lisbon, Portugal
Hi people,

this is what i'm considering.

Currently got a 2 year well over-due for an upgrade windows pc atm, and i simply love my iBook to bits, now with bootcamp here, i'm sorely tempted instead of upgrading this one buying a mac pro and dual boot xp (and vista when it comes out) and osx,

now is this a good idea?

because simply put pretty much the only reason i use a windows machine is games. Simple as.

How do the games run under bootcamp?

i suspect with the mac pro and a x1900xt they wouldnt have a problem, but has anyone found any major issues with it yet?

so good idea or bad idea?
 
I think it would be a fine idea. Some reports I've read say that the Windows drivers for it are not that great but apparently fixes are on the way.

Remember that the Mac Pro is a mighty powerful quad CPU machine. If you are not in need of such power you could probably do well to build a single Conroe machine rather than dual dual core xeons.

As far as dual dual core Xeon machines go Iv'e been unable to beat the Mac Pro in terms of price by spec'ing my own machine.
 
What do you intend on using the machine for?

As a high-end system (3D rendering, hardcore audio and video work etc.) there is nothing better than the Mac Pro for the price. However, if you want something for general home use I can't help but think you'd be better off spending £600 on a core duo mac mini (or £900 on a core duo iMac) and using the remaining £1100/700 over the cost of the default Mac Pro configuration purchasing a new Windows machine. Then you have a very capable machine to run OS X on, and an equally capable Windows box for gaming.
 
Well i do a lot of photoshop work, 3d rendering soon, and a lot of gaming, html work, and looking into getting into video editing at some point, main thing im concerned about is are the games buggy at all? do they run as they do on windows etc. To do with drivers and things? I just think its a fantastically priced machine for its specification!
 
Make sure it has lots of memory. Lots and lots of it. A friend installed the Vista beta on his machine (not a Mac) and at idle with nothing running it was using over 500mb of memory. When he started Media Player it was taking over 800mb :eek:

Mac's are lovely :)
 
Hades said:
Make sure it has lots of memory. Lots and lots of it. A friend installed the Vista beta on his machine (not a Mac) and at idle with nothing running it was using over 500mb of memory. When he started Media Player it was taking over 800mb :eek:

Mac's are lovely :)
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Ive run to Vista Beta on full whack on my machine and the GUI was taking 60mb alone :eek: and it was using about 500 - 600 mb idle, i was thinking about 2gb maybe three for the mac pro that enough?
 
Ok looking at this spec.

Specifications


* Two 2.66GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
* 1GB (2 x 512MB)
* ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
* 250GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
* 1 x SuperDrive
* Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme

I would like 2gb in there, but i can buy the ram seperately, 200 quid for an extra gig of ram is madness.

Look good to you guys?
 
Just out of interest, where do you intend to get the alternative RAM from ? I found one source in the States (forgotten name) and i wasn' really any cheaper.
 
philhoole said:
Just out of interest, where do you intend to get the alternative RAM from ? I found one source in the States (forgotten name) and i wasn' really any cheaper.
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I've just read else where that the Ram is very Hard to come buy and ususally isn't cheaper than Apple themselves, so i'll probably be going for 2gb taking the total price to £2,200 :) good price for that kinda spec imo
 
Phate said:
Hi people,

this is what i'm considering.

Currently got a 2 year well over-due for an upgrade windows pc atm, and i simply love my iBook to bits, now with bootcamp here, i'm sorely tempted instead of upgrading this one buying a mac pro and dual boot xp (and vista when it comes out) and osx,

now is this a good idea?

because simply put pretty much the only reason i use a windows machine is games. Simple as.

How do the games run under bootcamp?

i suspect with the mac pro and a x1900xt they wouldnt have a problem, but has anyone found any major issues with it yet?

so good idea or bad idea?
Click to expand...

DO IT!

I am on my brand spankin' new Mac Pro (2.66 / 1GB / 250GB if anyone wants to know)

it's awesome!

Boot Camp is spot on perfectly easy to do, took me about 35 mins.

Will get back to you with games, goingto test it out for that later tonight!

Rich
 
titchard - I've read some reports that HD performance is awful under Bootcamp. The HD is running in PIO mode and UDMA. Is this something you've noticed ?

I presume you got your MacPro with the 7300GT. I can't decide for sure if this is good enough for what I do although the Cinebench benchmarks seem to suggest it will be OK.
 
I got mine yesterday, 2.66/250gb/1gb so far im more then impressed with it. As a 10years Windows user Im amazed how quickly im learning how to use it, there are so many nice features that I like.

Photoshop and Aperture work very smoothly together even with only 1gb of ram.

As for your RAM concerns, guy at Apple confirmed that Crucial FB-Dimms will work perfectly, im going to be ordering 4x 1gb FBdimms soon and will try and sell on the 2x 512mb that came with it.
 
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philhoole said:
titchard - I've read some reports that HD performance is awful under Bootcamp. The HD is running in PIO mode and UDMA. Is this something you've noticed ?

I presume you got your MacPro with the 7300GT. I can't decide for sure if this is good enough for what I do although the Cinebench benchmarks seem to suggest it will be OK.
Click to expand...

As far as I can tell there is no slowdown it at all! although it was a bit sluggish when I logged into XP just, but its doing its usual update trawl and trying to ping a network cable in a port that goes nowhere so it may be that!

So as far as I am aware the HDDs seem fine.

Rich
 
Phate said:
I've just read else where that the Ram is very Hard to come buy and ususally isn't cheaper than Apple themselves, so i'll probably be going for 2gb taking the total price to £2,200 :) good price for that kinda spec imo
Click to expand...
I'm just waiting for things to settle down memory wise until I purchase, but i'm looking at 2 gb+ of memory for editing etc
 
28ten said:
I'm just waiting for things to settle down memory wise until I purchase, but i'm looking at 2 gb+ of memory for editing etc
Click to expand...

I was also thinking of doing the same, and also putting aother 250GB HDD in, theyare oly about £50, which is miles cheaper than the ones that apple charge to add for you!

Pretty certain its just any SATA drive too!

Rich
 
I've seen western digital drives with the apple logo on them

but i was under the impression any sata drive would work fine.
 
DreederOcUK said:
As for your RAM concerns, guy at Apple confirmed that Crucial FB-Dimms will work perfectly
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Crucial removed their FB-DIMMs from the compatability matrix for the Mac Pro, as they were proving unstable in their test systems. I'd hold off until they've reaproved them.

As for hard drives, any SATA drive will fit and function fine.
 
Can you run Windows XP x64 on the Mac Pro? I guess you would have to find drivers and stuff for the Intel bits but the Apple bits would be a no-go.
 
Echo toxin said:
Can you run Windows XP x64 on the Mac Pro? I guess you would have to find drivers and stuff for the Intel bits but the Apple bits would be a no-go.
Click to expand...
In theory you could but Apple has not written any hardware drivers for x64. If you want to run a 64-bit OS run Tiger. ;)
 
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