119 replies to this topic

[teflon]

So you're gonna finally make the jump to intel tBC? Wasn't it about 2-3 years ago that I said "Don't buy just yet, there's a new revision just around the corner!"

[Eric5h5]

the Battle Cat, on 27 July 2010 - 08:10 AM, said:

BTW, which one of you poor slobs bit the bullet and bought a Mac Pro?  The rest of us owe you a debt of gratitude.

Not me.  I was pretty sure I wasn't going for the top-end model this time, and now I'm totally, really, completely, 100% sure.  US$5K?  Gah.  I don't think I need 12 cores anyway...6 should be fine.

--Eric

[the Battle Cat]

teflon, on 27 July 2010 - 08:14 AM, said:

So you're gonna finally make the jump to intel tBC? Wasn't it about 2-3 years ago that I said "Don't buy just yet, there's a new revision just around the corner!"

You bastard!

[bobbob]

the Battle Cat, on 27 July 2010 - 12:55 PM, said:

You bastard!

What? It's here, so it was just around the corner the whole time like he said.

[the Battle Cat]

Around the corner of a different city in a different country on a different planet, in different solar system, in a galaxy far far away... but yeah like he said, "just around the corner".  I won't ban him but I'll make a note in his warning bar and I'll probably suspend him for a couple days and then go back and change some of his posts to make him sound like a doofus and probably knock a couple hundred posts off his post count and sabotage his profile and change his avatar to monotetrafluoroethylene then steal his girlfriend and ingratiate myself to his parents while living in his old room and wrecking his junk.

[Eric5h5]

Eric5h5, on 27 July 2010 - 08:44 AM, said:

I was pretty sure I wasn't going for the top-end model this time, and now I'm totally, really, completely, 100% sure.

Never mind...I just bought the 12-core model with 32GB RAM, 2 512GB SSD drives, 2 Superdrives, a RAID card, 2 2TB drives, and 2 SuperDrives on tBC's credit card.  Thanks dude!  This should be pretty good for word processing.

--Eric

[The Liberator]

Eric5h5, on 27 July 2010 - 07:45 PM, said:

Never mind...I just bought the 12-core model with 32GB RAM, 2 512GB SSD drives, 2 Superdrives, a RAID card, 2 2TB drives, and 2 SuperDrives on tBC's credit card.  Thanks dude!  This should be pretty good for word processing.

--Eric

I dunno, depends how many monitors you have, and your graphics card too.

Liberator.

[Eric5h5]

I got the Radeon HD 5870 and 3 of those new 27" monitors.  Is that enough?  Should I get another card and double the number of displays?

--Eric

[The Liberator]

Eric5h5, on 27 July 2010 - 09:08 PM, said:

I got the Radeon HD 5870 and 3 of those new 27" monitors.  Is that enough?  Should I get another card and double the number of displays?

--Eric

Well, that is not too bad, but I think another card and three more monitors could not hurt? tBC does not need money anyway, he has catnip.

Liberator.

[the Battle Cat]

I don't get it.  I don't even HAVE a credit card since that Mustang Ranch fiasco of 1999.

[The Liberator]

the Battle Cat, on 28 July 2010 - 08:44 AM, said:

I don't get it.  I don't even HAVE a credit card since that Mustang Ranch fiasco of 1999.

Yeah, whatever. That is what they all say.

Liberator.

[Tesseract]

Tetsuya, on 21 May 2010 - 01:12 AM, said:

still no idea what is causing the random slowdowns and hangs.  TechTool has given both the memory and the Hard Drives a clean bill of health after exhaustive testing.

The chance of seeing memory errors on a Mac Pro with any piece of software like this is vanishingly small, because you have ECC memory. The vast majority of errors are transparently corrected, and the vast majority of uncorrectable errors will be detected and cause an immediate kernel panic (different to the one you're getting).

[Tetsuya]

the new pricing is out, and i have to say, i'm pretty unimpressed.  

I really wanted to get a machine with the newer Westmere processor(s), but its a cool thousand bucks to even get a single six core chip... that's just absurd.  

So, looks like i waited all that time for essentially nothing - the basic quad-core nehalem is totally unchanged from the previous incarnation except for the mid-range 5750 as the standard video card...

yay.

edit:  5770* - which is a plain sidegrade from the 4870 in my current machine.  I wonder if it is possible to get the 5770 to boot/run in a Woodcrest machine? If so, i'll just leave the card stock, and swap in my slighly faster 4870 for now.  

I have to wonder why, since the 8-core option uses a pair of quad-core Westmere, why the base quad-core single-processor machine doesn't use a Westmere.  

bleh

[Sneaky Snake]

Tetsuya, on 11 August 2010 - 11:17 PM, said:

the new pricing is out, and i have to say, i'm pretty unimpressed.  

I really wanted to get a machine with the newer Westmere processor(s), but its a cool thousand bucks to even get a single six core chip... that's just absurd.  

So, looks like i waited all that time for essentially nothing - the basic quad-core nehalem is totally unchanged from the previous incarnation except for the mid-range 5750 as the standard video card...

yay.

edit:  5770* - which is a plain sidegrade from the 4870 in my current machine.  I wonder if it is possible to get the 5770 to boot/run in a Woodcrest machine? If so, i'll just leave the card stock, and swap in my slighly faster 4870 for now.  

I have to wonder why, since the 8-core option uses a pair of quad-core Westmere, why the base quad-core single-processor machine doesn't use a Westmere.  

bleh

Well the quad core got bumped up to 2.8 GHz, and is a more efficient chip as well, but yea, not much of an upgrade. The GPU prices aren't that bad really though. They are charging $450 for a 5870 in the display category, which is pretty close to what they go for normally (in Canada at least). Get the 5870, you won't regret it.

Also, apple is saying that the new 5770 and 5870 won't work in any Mac Pro except the Nehalem ones due to the mobo being a different chipset, but I call BS on that. I'm gonna have a 5850 1 GB available pretty soon that I'm going to hopefully flash and install in my early 2008 Mac Pro (pre Nehalem)

[Eric5h5]

Yeah...I'll wait for some benchmarks, but initially this is pretty annoying.  I wasn't expecting the 6-core model to be so expensive.

--Eric

[Tetsuya]

Eric5h5, on 12 August 2010 - 08:55 PM, said:

Yeah...I'll wait for some benchmarks, but initially this is pretty annoying.  I wasn't expecting the 6-core model to be so expensive.

--Eric

i looked at the prices of the 6-core Westmere processors on NewEgg - apparently Apple is charging you slightly less to upgrade to a Westmere Hexacore than it would be to buy one OEM....

so, i guess im not as annoyed at Apple...

but i still have no idea why the basic Quad-core isnt Westmere based instead of Nehalem - as the Westmere Quad core's are quite a bit more affordable.

edit: also, the "newer" Nehalem's that are used in the base quad-core use the same socket as the Westmeres and the MoBo will support the Westmere, so in the future it would be feasible to upgrade a base quad-core Nehalem 2010 Pro to a Westmere hexacore when the prices come down.

[Eric5h5]

Tetsuya, on 12 August 2010 - 09:38 PM, said:

edit: also, the "newer" Nehalem's that are used in the base quad-core use the same socket as the Westmeres and the MoBo will support the Westmere, so in the future it would be feasible to upgrade a base quad-core Nehalem 2010 Pro to a Westmere hexacore when the prices come down.

Hmm, good point.

--Eric

[devSin]

Tetsuya, on 12 August 2010 - 09:38 PM, said:

but i still have no idea why the basic Quad-core isnt Westmere based instead of Nehalem - as the Westmere Quad core's are quite a bit more affordable.

I don't think this is the case? If anything, Westmere should be more expensive?

Assuming Apple's suggested part no.s are correct, the Nehalem quad-core is slightly cheaper than the (lower clock) Westmere quads that are standard for the eight-core Mac Pro.

It also seems you can get 6GB RAM at pretty much fair market value now (8GB starts to get too much a premium), which is pretty sweet to have it all covered under AppleCare. I too wish the price would be closer to $3000 (so I could add the svelte 27" display), but $4500 doesn't seem like it's too out-of-line with the way Mac Pros have been (and I still remember my Nov'99 450MHz Power Mac G4 (she was 500MHz, before they delayed it, and then they went dual-processor next summer) with 21" studio display (piece of junk didn't last more than a few years) 18GB LVD Ultra2 SCSI HD ATI Rage 128 (with some paltry amount of VRAM) 384MB RAM DVD-RAM (remember that dud?) ZIP (praise the lord the disk era is over) 56K internal modem ran about $3500). I guess if you need a new display and peripherals, it would probably be too much, but if you already have (or can stretch existing hardware), I don't think it's a giant premium.

I would have to keep my 21" Sony CRT (another colossal hunk of total junk, but at least it STILL TURNS ON), which makes me half sad (I still hate LCDs), but I guess you can't always get everything you want.

I just wish there were more GPU upgrade options for the Mac Pro. That and RAM is probably the biggest factor in longevity (with the Radeon 8500 and double the RAM, that Nov'99 G4 I talked about is still running and still used to play Mac OS 9 games and run Classic applications). But they say the 5870 won't work in older Mac Pros, and next year or two years out, they'll say the 6980 or the 7090 or whatever random sequence of meaningless numbers they come up with next won't work on the '10 or '11 Mac Pros because the thing changed in the thing and it won't work without the changed thing, so you'll be stuck with the stock card or have to flash some PC card and hope that it works and that you'll never need support for it.

[bobbob]

devSin, on 13 August 2010 - 12:18 PM, said:

Assuming Apple's suggested part no.s are correct, the Nehalem quad-core is slightly cheaper than the (lower clock) Westmere quads that are standard for the eight-core Mac Pro

Yeah, there's no Westmere quite as cheap as the base model, and the difference in GHz for the other probably won't be made up by Westmere's improvements.

Here's the cost vs. price breakdown:

Chip				 1000's
Nehalem  W3530	   $294	   Cost Difference   RDF
Nehalem  W3565	   $562	   $268			  + $132 / 49%
Westmere W3680	   $999	   $437			  + $367 / 83%

Westmere E5620	2x $387
Westmere X5650	2x $996	   $1218			 + $282 / 23%
Westmere X5670	2x$1440	   $888			  + $312 / 35%

Apple's in peak form on the base models, as usual.

[Sneaky Snake]

I'm fairly certain that we'll be able to get the 5870 working in the early 2008 Mac Pro's (what I have). It's got the 64 bit EFI. It's definitely not a power supply issue, because the 5870 pulls significantly less watts then the GTX 285.

Also, I expect that there will be flashed one's for sale, much like the current 4870's