The Core i7s on Newegg won't work. You need a Xeon class processor for the Mac Pro still. Intel doesn't build the logic into the consumer CPUs to support talking to another physical chip, since in most cases it would be wasted die space.

And until the systems start shipping and people tear into them, noone will really know what is involved in upgrading them. Photos from Apple.com show the processor and memory on a removable board, so they may just plug in a single processor only board into the models with one CPU.

Also one correction above, the base price on the old 8 core systems was $2799, and removing one processor brought it to $2399. I may have been remembering my corporate discount prices instead of the retail prices.

I think you'll find it a real challenge to acquire the Apple heatsink/pipe for the second processor. But it might be worth a Google to see if anyone else has come up with a creative solution to that road.

From the pictures on Apple's site, it looks like each CPU is on its own (Apple custom) daughterboard along with its RAM slots. I'd imagine these boards can't be obtained separately. Plus, normal Core i7 won't do, they need to be Core i7 Xeons (55xx) to work in two-socket machines. Plus to that plus, Apple's site says that the Core i7 Xeon in the single-CPU Mac Pros is a "3500 series" Xeon, which the Nehalem Wikipedia page hasn't even heard of, and which might potentially have had its two-socket support nobbled.

Peter

I've bought the Applecare plan on every Apple laptop, and it's been well worth it. One failure, and the plan pays for it's self. I also recently bought it for my Mac Pro, as it was approaching a year old. Two tips I'd recommend. Don't bother buying it with the system, as it can be added any time during the first year. After a year, I have a pretty good feeling about how much longer the system will meet my needs. Also, buy the plans off eBay. A bunch of resellers are having pricing wars on them there, and buy it now prices are well below the retail, or even student prices Apple offers. My Mac Pro plan for example cost me $80, retail was $250.

All you have to do is find a friendly local Apple reseller that also does support, and is willing to order the parts. Of course, the Apple Stores are forcing some of these places to close down, but it's still an option.

Yeah, I figured that it's unlikely.


You're correct. That was the actual retail pricing.

Oh... If anyone is considering ordering from Apple online and you don't currently work for a company with an Apple corporate discount, send me a PM. I may be able to offer you some advice.

Those of you that can qualify for educational pricing however should probably look into that right from the start. I think the discounts are generally the same as the corporate.

Yes, good point!

I was just figuring that the APP could be a good investment to protect my £1900 expense

Cheers

Cris.

Thanks for the tip!

Apple quoted me £165 inc VAT, there is one on there for £95 inc postage. £70 back in the bank account!

The reason I was thinking about AAP is that I got an automatic extension on my MacBook warranty when I bought it, it was some kind of offer being offered to education buyers at the time, I didn't get the phone support but the Apple Store changed out my battery after 2 1/2 years almost without question.

Thanks again.

Cheers

Cris.

You'll be spending a lot of time transcoding if you use the 5D. While Final Cut Pro will change project settings to match the h.264 generated files, it spends 'ages' rendering every little change you make.

Unless you like spending several hours a day sitting in front of a progress bar you'd better buy the fastest machine.

I had my heart set on a shiny new iMac, the prospect of the Mac Pro was never in the equation. But it does seem to be a better idea. I think the 4 core processor should be more capable than the 3.06Ghz iMac, but as there aren't any speedtests out there yet for the 4 core Mac Pro it will have to be a bit of a punt.

I could wait of course, but I'm not good at waiting.

Cheers

Cris.

Like Tom says, it might be a good idea to check out the feasibility of adding another CPU later. We've found FCP threads very well unlike Avid. So we found it better/cheaper to have fewer faster cores on Avid workstations and a greater number of slower cores on FCP workstations.

One nice feature of the Core i7 is a dynamic clocking process. If it detects a core or two being pegged by a process, but other cores idle, it will turn up the clock rate a bit to speed up the cores in use, while shutting down the idle cores.

I'm not sure how well this works, but it's an interesting feature.

As for adding an extra processor later to the Mac Pro, odds are it will cost quite a bit more after the fact then just buying the dual CUP machine day 1. The cost a friend of mine was quoted for the Early 2008 Mac Pro CPU at 2.8GHZ plus Apple heatsink was $1100. The option to go from quad to dual quad was only $500 when the machine was being ordered.

Unfortunately, there is a nasty sting in the tale of the new "cheaper" entry model. Unlike the previous 4 core model the new one does not have a second CPU socket. The 4 core that is in my price range is what I will have to stick with, there is no question of me shelling out for the new £2500 8 core model. I am already pushing my budget well beyond what I have saved for this.

It's either the new 4 core, or an iMac for me. I have a fixed budget for spending on the new business and this will take every last penny of that. It will mean a few other ideas will have to wait for the business to actually bring in money. But the old MacBook is creaking under the pressure. I sorted and edited almost 500 photos via Lightroom and PS on Monday, I think it almost died on me! It's going to become a major bottle neck if it isn't replaced by the time I start shooting a few video ideas I have.

I have been reading a few of the Mac forums and there is a bit of bad feeling about the new 4 core being so expensive, as the CPU is relatively cheap compared to the 2 CPUs in the 8 core models. I suppose that doesn't really matter to me, as there is no chance I can afford the 8 core anyway.

People seem to be loving the new MacMini though, I find that hard to understand as the price has gone up to £500 here in the UK, and that's just the base model.

Cheers

Cris.

I have nothing but praise for the old Mac Minis. I've got 11 of them running FCP 6 quite happily and these are old 1.6 core duos with intel gma. I'd expect the new ones to simply fly.

If you're saying there's now no dual CPU upgrade path for the Pro. I'd say buy the tricked out iMac, you could even use your existing screen as a second monitor with it.

From what I can tell so far, there is no way to upgrade the new 4 core to an 8 core machine. But I think I would be unlikely to do that anyway, as Tom points out it could be expensive.

It's not an easy decision to make, The price difference between the top iMac and the base Mac Pro is only £100 now. I already have a good monitor, so it's not like I really need the iMac's screen, but a dual desktop would be very nice to have.

I think what I will do is to wait for a little while and see what Apple do. It will also be very nice to see some real life tests before blowing my budget.

Cheers

Cris.

Perhaps the software gurus will get around to using those 16/32 GPU processors for this kind of work, rather than having them mostly idle. The payoff could be even larger for a full size box with a higher end add-in card and 100's of GPU processors.

Not to mention the separate h.264 decoder circuitry.

Cheers

Apple's next OS update, SnowLeopard is going to provide a lot of support for GPU computing in the form of OpenCL. There's work under way for Windows support as well, but from what I hear, it's slower going without as concrete a timeline.

How that translates to computing cycles for applications like Lightroom remains to be seen. In theory, if they're using certain OS APIs (that are updated to use OpenCL) they may benefit without needing any updates. Fingers crossed.

One can count on Apple's own software to be optimized for OpenCL going forward. This should include things like FCP and its constituent applications.

I can't help noticing that the new Mac Pros are only available with furiously powerful video cards -- there isn't a fanless option like there was on the first generation. Which, unless they've got big plans for OpenCL, I find odd, as one of the valuable things about the Mac Pro to me is that it's so quiet in use for such a powerful workstation.

Peter

Like Cris, I'm debating between the different Apple models for my home and work needs, both of which are currently running older Mac mini's with very much older Cinema 23" displays (one of which is flaking out).

My temptation, for work, is to get a 24" iMac for me, and one for everybody else in my group. They do the job and they can reuse older monitors as second displays. The only real question is whether we should pony up for one of the models with the fancier graphics card. There could be some real payoff there, if/when OpenCL takes off.

For home, it's a harder decision. The home machine runs Adobe Lightroom and it's sluggish. I occasionally want to encode video with iMovie and it takes forever. I've got ~1.2TB of state, currently living on external Firewire hard drives. I'd like to migrate this to internal drives running ZFS, which should be entirely feasible on a MacPro. Maybe I should just wait for 10.6 to come out before pulling the trigger on that so I have a better idea what Apple's really up to. (Also, I may prefer to go the Hackintosh route, with a regular Core i7 desktop PC, presumably saving a non-trivial amount of money.)

Trigger pulled this AM. 2.93GHz 17" MacBook pro with anti-glare screen. Added a Canon Pixma MP480 to that, which will be a gift for my parents, at $29 after ($100) rebate. Purchase made with affiliate Employee discount which saved a few bucks.

Bought it with a CC that offers an additional year of purchase protection/warranty on top of whatever the manufacturer has by default. I may still buy Apple's 2-year AppleCare extension on eBay as suggested by Tom. This would overlap the CC's warranty extension though, so I'll only do it if I can get it very low priced (since it's only adding 1 more year in this case). If I had bought the AppleCare with the CC at the time I bought the computer, it would add a year to the AC's 2. AC was too pricy directly from Apple though.

On-topic for this thread, I might also pick up another Guardian Maximus RAID1 enclosure as a backup device. My current one is being used to store media on my Sage box right now. Ideally I'd like to connect this to a new Airport Express Extreme (another thread later) and use AirPort Disk with Time Machine.

The Airport Express can only share printers, not disks off the USB port it has. The Airport Extreme and Time Capsule have the disk sharing features. They also added a handy feature yesterday, allowing remote disk access via MobileMe, similar to Back to my Mac.

Yeah I wrote "Express" by accident. Too similar (to my brain) to "Extreme"

I'm not in as much of a hurry to get the new access point as the machine, so I thought I'd wait until someone gets it and performs some benchmarks.

I'm also curious how much functionality I'll be losing from the Tomato firmware I'm using on my WRT54G.

Some extra features I'm using:
-QoS to make sure my VOIP adapter has priority over everything else.
-Bandwidth logging to a remote machine (CIFS share) so I can see how much data is going up/down per day, monthly, etc.. I have a capped net connection so this is rather important.
-Static IP addresses for specific machines on the LAN

Just a quick heads up for anyone who is thinking about the new Mac Pro as I am. I have just had a quote in writing from Apple that included a discount of just under 20% off the UK prices listed on the website at the moment. The margins must be huge!

Looks like it could be a Mac Pro for me

If anyone wants the details please PM me.

Cheers

Cris.

Hey, that naming scheme is almost as brilliant as composite/component. So easy!

The Airport routers support this. I'm not certain about your other two, though I have seen external logging options in the router. I'll have to see what it can do. QoS seems to be something a lot of people indicate is missing.

QoS I suppose isn't a deal-breaker because I have a couple of options. One would be possibly use my existing WRT54G set up between the APE and Modem doing only QoS duty. Optionally I could buy another dedicated device for this purpose, such as Hawking Tech's Broadband Booster

The APE isn't cheap, but compared to other devices that offer its benefits, it's not too bad (such as Linksys' 600-somethingN product that supports multi-frequency)

P.S. Don't tell my wife about the MBP purchase...

I was just listening to the Engadget podcast today, and they pointed out how absurd it is that that's Apple's actual term for the matte screen. I suppose they thought that the average consumer doesn't know what "matte" means, but "anti-glare" seems to imply that their standard screens are what, "pro-glare"?

I don't really care what they call it as long as I can get it. About the only thing that does bother me about it is having to pay extra for it.

"Matte" is not a description traditionally used for screens. At least I don't remember anyone using it until the glossy screens appeared. I'd think that everyone who's in the market for the 17" MBP would know what it means.

"Anti-Glare" however is at least a couple of decades old when used to describe screens. Used mostly as a description of the finish or special coating applied to a screen to cut reflections/glare.

Matte is less techy than Anti-Glare in fact, being used in general artistic and decorating/home improvement circles.

The standard screens, being glossy, are definitely pro-glare. They're like mirrors in some instances.

Do the guys in the Engadget podcast come off sounding as dumb-ass as they do when they post to the site? Just wondering/saying.

To bring this back on topic

Today, I have installed a new fan in my Drobo. I went with the suggested fan from the link Rob gave a few posts back. A great improvement over the stock fan. Amazing how much of a difference it makes really. I think the new one actually moves more air too as I can feel it with my hand, where I couldn't with the stock fan.

Cheers

Cris.