Apple's new 12-core Mac Pro now available to order - Page 2

Absolutely will be getting the eSATA card....and I still have a G4 dual 1GB machine that still works well and does the job-now thats really getting my money's worth.
I added extra drives and ports. The only limit is the speed to do video which is why I will be getting the G5, probably the 6 core.

Anyone have any experience using an SSD as a boot drive and also the apps. I want to put Photoshop CS5 and Aperture on it but want to use a 2TB drive for the Library since it will get much bigger than what the SSD will hold.

I have been using a Crucial c300 SSD for the past month or two, it definitely makes many things faster. Apps launch instantly, boot up is super fast... BUT, I am using a single 1 TB drive for my data (photos, videos, etc) and obviously reading/writing that is still as slow as normal. So working with large files is still pretty slow. I would highly recommend a striped RAID setup instead of a single large drive (2x1TB instead of 1x2TB).

You are better off picking a very basic configuration and buying your own Ram and own drives etc where you will save considerably over what apple charges to upgrade components, especially the ram. Huge savings there.

I don't know why anyone would want to stripe drives now days. The single drives are plenty fast enough to capture full uncompressed HD video. IMO the only RAID worth doing inside of a Mac Pro would be RAID 1 or if you wanted to stripe for some reason then RAID 1+0 which requires 4 drives That way you at least have some fault tolerance. With stripe RAID 0, if one drive fails, all data is lost. And drive failure is much more common in RAID 0 setups than plain old single drives because of the extra overhead of drive management and synchronizing required- more stuff to go wrong. You also need heavy duty 1.5M MTBF drives. Regular HDs don't seem to be able to take the punishment for very long.

Apple was doing much better on RAM prices for other models recently. iMacs and Mini RAM upgrades were roughly in line with what you could get online. They fell down on that hard with the MP. Hard Drives have always been too expensive, altho the SSD drives were at least more realistic in pricing.


Newegg.com Mac Memory
Kingston 4GB DDR3 1066 ECC $222
Kingston 4x4GB DDR3 1066 ECC $859

Of course, DDR3 1066 is the memory for the 2.4 dual systems, not the DDR3 1333 based systems.


Newegg Server Memory (Not Mac specific)
Kingston 4GB DDR3 1333 $129/$246 (Not positive the differences between the 2 and why oe is half the price)
Kingstone 2x4GB DDR3 1333 $278

Looking at the 12 core MP, we see that:
24GB from Apple is $2550
32GB is $3550

Assuming all the memory listed above functions in the MP w/no problem, the 12-Core sytem could be upgraded to 24 and 32GB of RAM for $834 and $1112 respectively, saving you $1700 and $2400. The 2.4 Dual could get maxed for $1718 instead of $3550, saving you over $1800. Not bad at all. Again, providing the memory you find in online stores functions properly in the Mac.

Are the SSD drives 2.5 or 3.5 inch?

How many USB peripherals were there when Apple first introduced the iMac? Don't Apple fans like to credit Apple with driving USB adoption? And being the first to adopt new technologies?

I just wish software could take better advantage off all those cores. What a waste it seems.

Why does Apple fill the memory slots with 1 GB modules, leaving only 1 or 2 slots available? Why not use 2 GB modules and leave more slots open?

You don't have your facts straight. Apple wasn't the first to adopt USB, nor most other common technologies. They weren't even the first to use the DisplayPort standard.

What they tend to be is the first to adopt a new technology across the board (as well as being the first to completely abandon obsolecing tech).

A company issuing a tidal wave of change will always get noticed over the faint ripple of a company dipping their toe to test the waters. But go ahead and be a cynical Apple hater, it seems to suit you.

Besides the cost of less dense RAM modules, I think spreading out the RAM does in fact increase performance by using all available channels.

I checked newegg and the price for a nehalem xeon quad at 2.8ghz is $1200 while a westmere quad at 2.4ghz is only $390. But the price for the 8-core westmere macpro is $1200 more than the 4-core nehalem macpro.

What gives other than 3 more gig of ram?

Thanks for your thoughts.

You learn to tell joysticks from professional equipment first, then you come ask ``provocative' ' questions...

apple sell fiber channel card and others usb 3 cards. go buy them. it's an expandable pci-express machine.

Me I'm a professional, I need a powerful computer with tons of rams and ethernet 1gb/s copper.

because usb3 is not all standard on many pc. as usb2 at first, there are mostly no devices, so no apple.


and besides, think about intel chipset. Intel has no usb3 chipset on the market, so no usb3 in apple motherboard. that simple

go buy a usb3 card.

think about the motherboard.

Ram is always changing. take the minimum of ram from apple and go in others resellers to check price. Be careful, you need ecc ram with temperature controller.

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of course paying is hurtful. so what?

On one hand, there are 27 USB 3.0 external drivese & bare enclosures on Newegg, so they're out now with a fair variety. On the other, it adds latency compared to eSATA, and there are known Mac drivers for eSATA cards, not so much with USB 3.0 that I can find yet.


I haven't heard of memory with a thermal sensor, thanks for the heads-up.

Here's the processors Apple is using in their Mac Pros this year:

2.8 Quad: W3530 - $294
3.2 Quad: W3565 - $562
3.33 Hex: W3680 - $999

2.4 2x Quad: E5620 - $387
2.66 2x Hex: X5650 - $996
2.93 2x Hex: X5670 - $1440

All pricing comes from Intel's Bulk 1k pricing here:
http://ark.intel.com/ProductCollecti...x?familyId=594


The base quad model is $2499 w/a $300 CPU, the base 8-core model is $3499 w/2 $400 CPUs, there's $500 for just CPUs. 3 more GB RAM is probably $100 to Apple, with the rest going towards the dual CPU sub-board needed to house the extra CPU and RAM slots (plus a little Apple margin).


Regarding the USB 3 issue, I think everyone is disappointed it was not included because everyone hates to buy a machine right before a new I/O technology comes out. At this point the only devices that I've seen take advantage of USB 3 are external HDs. I'm sure more will come in the future, but at this point eSATA seems like a much better option for external HDs. 1 of the main reasons I bought a Mac Pro instead of an iMac was so I could easily add a USB3, eSATA, or Lightpeak card down the road.

if i were to use a MacPro (4-core nehalem) to run windows 7 via parallels and giving paralells 2-cores to use, would it be or feel as fast as running a PC with icore3 say at 2.8Ghz all else being equal?

thanks for your thoughts.

Profits by Mac Pro system. This will list the processor option from the Apple Store, it's BTO cost, cost from the above Intel site and profit for Apple. This doesn't include any potential deeper profit from Apple possibly having a better than average agreement with Intel. Cost of base processor, subtracted from cost of upgrade processor, compared against the BTO upgrade price.

Quad Core:
2.8 ($294, included in base price)
3.2 $400 (cost increase $268, profit $132 or 33% of BTO)
3.33 $1200 (cost increase $705, profit $495 or 41.25% of BTO)

8 Core:
2x2.4 ($774, included in base price)
2x2.66 $1500 (cost increase $1218, profit $282 or 18.8% of BTO)
2x2.93 $2700 (cost increase $2106, profit $594 or 22% of BTO)

12 Core:
2x2.66 ($1992, included in base price)
2x2.93 $1200 (cost increase $888, profit $312 or 26% of BTO)

Apple's profits for CPU upgrades, based on public Intel prices, ranges from 18.8-41.25% depending on which model is being upgraded. Slimmest margin appears to be upgrading the 2x2.4 Quad Core to 2x2.66 6 Core. Largest profit 2.8 Quad increased to 3.33 6 Core.


Just for the heck of it, here is the same info for the iMacs.

3.06 i3-540 Dual $117
3.2 i3-550 Dual $138
3.6 i5-680 Dual $294
2.8 i5-760 Quad $205
2.93 i7-875K Quad $342

21.5" and 27"
3.2 i3 ($138, included in base price)
3.6 i5 $200 ($294, $44 profit or 22%)

27"
2.8 i5 ($205, included in base price)
2.93 i7 $200 ($342, $63 profit or 31.5%)

Profit ranges from 22-31.5% on iMac CPU upgrades.

I assume 2.5 inch, but will need to see. Anyone?

To my knowledge, no one makes 3.5 SSDs. I could be wrong tho.

I did a search and found an OCZ 3.5 inch drive but it appears to be the exception, not the rule, at the moment.

Has anyone noticed that the 3.33 GHz Hexacore (W3680) is more expensive than the 8-core model with two 2.44 GHz quads (E5620)? This isn't so surprising given the unit prices graciously posted above, but I'm really interested to see how the two stack up performance-wise. Given the fairly large difference in clock-speeds, the 6-core seems to do more total cycles per second, but not by much. I wonder too whether having 6 cores on one die will cause more heat related performance slowdown compared with two separate quads, though the quads may suffer slow-down due to interprocessor communication. It's a really interesting performance test.

It seems the 2.4 GHz 8-core Mac Pro is probably better value for hard-core parallel processing, especially considering it is US$425 cheaper in an 8 Gb configuration (see * below), though apps that can't max 6 cores will likely perform much better on the higher clocked 6-core.

Does anyone have any PC performance stats or benchmarks for these processor configurations with the chips Apple are using?

3.33 Gh x 6 = 19.98 GHz
2.4 Gh x 8 = 19.2 GHz

*Because the base ram specs for the different processor configurations were different I had to unify their other stats by giving both machines the same configuration of RAM (upping them to 8 Gb).

US$4074 3.33 GHz 6-core 12 Gb (4 x 2 Gb)
US$3649 2.4 GHz 8-core 12 Gb (4 x 2 Gb)

My hexcore mac pro (6 GB ram) is scheduled to arrive Friday. If you've got benchmarks you want run I'd be happy to give it a shot.

perhaps, but the dual quads also offer significantly more total memory bandwidth, if you fill the memory slots properly. (2*25.6 GBps vs 1*32 GBps)

Yes, I noticed this too while comparing configurations. I would also love to see some benchmarks comparing the two systems. I am not sure I can justify the cost to upgrade at this time, I *may* wait for the next update (my G5 Quad is still doing the business - just! Geekbench ~3300) but very interested to see a performance comparison of those two systems. My use would be predominantly Pro-Audio..