The upgrade from 8x 2.2ghz to 8x 2.6ghz is $1400!!!
According to Intel pricing at Xbitlabs.com, a 4-core 2.26 Nehalem Xeon (E5520) chip is $373 (in quantities of 1000). The 4-core 2.66 Nehalem Xeon (E5550) chip is $958. The Intel price difference for two chips is $1170. But Apple could be getting a much better price (like $300 or less) on the Mac Pro standard 2.26 chips since they're buying those in much larger quantities than the Mac Pro optional 2.66 chip, moving the price differential over $1300.
So yes Apple is taking a piece, but almost all of the cost difference is attributable to the Intel pricing.
My 8c Dual 2.8, 14gig Ram is looking pretty sweet right now.
Here is the real kicker... what are the benchmarks going to say when Snow Leopard comes out?
Talk about hitting a wall... 8 times.
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
I would think that anyone needing more than 8G of RAM isn't going to buy the 4 core processor and Apple is probably trying to keep the costs down, since adding connectors, etc. to offer 32G of RAM is more expensive.
Well, some apps are more memory than CPU starved (lightroom and photoshop as examples; running filters isn't a most-of-the-time sort of thing, but memory is always beneficial). 4 cores and lots of memory is a valid use space.
And I wonder how 4-core 2.66 is vs. 8-core 2.33 on existing programs that may not always be cleanly multithreaded...
If it is cost saving, it is not really reflected in the Mac Pro price ;-)
I was wondering why they removed the 15,000 RPM drive option when they have benchmarks on Apple's MacPro site for read/write speed tests using both 15,000 and 7,200 RPM drives for those tests.
Don't they realize that people need the 15K drives for video apps?
It's a little odd that Apple has been removing pro options...however, any self-respecting person would buy the absolute base (and just play around with the processor options) and buy memory and storage from some place that isn't hell-bent on ripping its customers off.
It pains me to see what Apple is charging its customers for HD and RAM upgrades.
My point was about the (again) lack of any upgradeability options on what is supposed to be a "tower" type machine.
Which is flat out false.
Sure, you can't easily upgrade the CPU (but I suspect it is possible with a little work), but you keep ignoring that you can easily upgrade ram, hard drives, and PCI cards.
And while you're not happy that each new generation uses different ram and CPU slot, that doesn't make the ram any less upgradable, just not backwards compatible which is an entirely different issue. And that's exactly the same situation as the PCs that use the exact same chips and motherboards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by irondoll
Is the 8GB limit a cynical ploy to push us up to the 8 core machines, or really the best engineering compromise possible with Nehalem?
From what I have read, the eight slots are divided between four each for each of the two CPUs, so with one CPU you can only access four of the slots. I'm not sure what's up with maxing out with 2G chips instead of 4G, or if that's a false limitation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vitaflo
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
But is the new quad really faster than the old 8 core (which Apple is trying to pass off as an "upgrade")?
If I get two new Apple LED 24" displays to go with the new Mac Pro, I assume I'll have to plug one in the Mini DP port and one in the DVI (through an adaptor). By doing this, will the signal/display quality and frequency across the two displays match? Or will the one plugged in the DVI via adaptor be slightly worse?
If so, can both displays somehow (though an alternate adaptor) be plugged into the one Mini DP port?
Know what I mean?
You can't add a second 24" display unless you add a second card.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ginja
I think this image shows a dual processor version of the case, there's two heatsinks.
This picture from the front page only has one heatsink:
Also, the motherboard seems to be in two parts, as the lower part can slide out so you can add memory. Seems a little over-the-top seeing as it's fairly accessible anyway! Any other reason they've done it like this? Maybe the heatsinks are too heavy to support with the mobo vertical.
Incidently, the specs say you can have up to 4x nVidia GT120 cards to support up to 8 displays. I wonder if this is using 10.5.7, as the drivers for the GT120 and HD4870 weren't in 10.5.6, afaik.
I wouldn't call it over the top. They needed more motherboard space and Ive's design team apparently wasn't going to budge on the case, so they did what Apple engineer do best (but seem to not have much opportunity with the slim is are only concern): Innovate. The DIMMs could not be on riser cards, so they put the CPUs on a big quick-path connected riser card and made it easier to access the memory CPUs. I just which they had the opportunity make it a bit wider for the additional DIMMs. I really like how they designed so you could work on it without having to tip it on its side.
Personally, I'd rather have a machine that is stable and works, rather than tinkering around with alternate processors and motherboards and then being frustrated when i get a blue screen of death. Luckily, I'm a Mac, and I am just happy in my land of productivity and creativity.
"You're a Mac" WTF does that mean!! Don't be an idiot like the win users running around saying "I'm a PC." The people in the ads are metaphors for the actual computers NOT for users!
You can't add a second 24" display unless you add a second card.
The apple webpage says that you can have two monitors on one card, one with dvi and one with displayport. Eight monitors max with four cards.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vitaflo
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
It looks like Nehalem is 50% to 100% faster than harpertown when matched clock for clock.
Finally Apple has put up the prices. Thus targeting even more for the rich people amongst us. I feel a lot more exclusive now. Don't people get it. Apple makes products for rich people not for poor people scraping money from their backs to finally have saved up enough to make a "big" purchase.
Get over it. If you have a Mac be glad to have entered into an elite group cheap. I you don't, then don't bother. It's just for rich people. Buy a Dell computer. Don't put your hat where you can't reach it.
/JERK
I think we are paying Apples lawsuits, don't you think?
Let's hack some more.
Or maybe we should just be content with the mac we have at the moment or use a PC for a while.
The headline news I got from this announcement? The Mac Pro no longer has a high-end GPU option. ATI has lowered the price of the 512MB HD4870 to $149. It's a mid-range GPU. The GT120 is a rebranded 9500GT which was a rebranded 8600GT. It retails for about $60 now. What's more Apple is charging $200 to upgrade from the GT120 to HD4870. The entire HD4870 is only worth $150 so Apple is making $100+ pure profit from a $150 GPU by charging the equivalent of $260 for it.
Nehalem is a great CPU and it's great Apple is getting first dibs, but with their recent promotion of GPU technology, their inability to outfit the Mac Pro with a high-end GPU is disappointing.
They are probably limited in GPU choice because they wanted to be an early adopter of DisplayPort. There just aren't that many displayport cards - a month ago I could only find one $1000 ATI card when I googled it.
I just did two things I never do when a new model comes out.
One, I ordered it the first day.
Two, I ordered the middle speed model instead of the top model. Dual 2.66 GHz cpus will have to do for now. The dual 2.93 GHz model is even too expensive for me, now that I'm retired.
I figured that, that was my mistake. That actually does suck. Why take away the expandability options for the Mac Pro? That doesn't make much sense, especially for a Professional Machine.
For some reason, the single cpu model doesn't accept the 4GB memory modules. Otherwise, you could go to 16 GB.
The other reason is that memory slots are limited per processor. One chip, 4 slots.
I wonder whether the still very expensive 4GB sticks WILL work, just that Apple isn't saying so. This has happened before, so it's a possibility they just haven't tested the machine with them, as people buying the machine are limited by cost, so expensive memory is likely something that Apple figures they won't be buying.
Damn, the single CPU is pricey. It's using a Xeon 3500 and they have the price points as the regular Core i7s.
I'm really shocked about the prices. You can buy or build a faster Core i7 for half that. And only 8GB of RAM? Even the 4 slot Intel board supports up to 16GB. I think you can probably put in 4GB DIMMs in there and get 16GB. I hope.
Those prices are shocking. You were previously able to buy a quad 2.66 for £1470 or something. Now the entry level quad 2.66 model is £1899. Over £400 increase.
GPUs are also disappointing although we've yet to see what they'll be capable of. I'd personally rather have a reliable GPU that runs cool enough than one that freezes up like the old X1900XTs.
The lack of a Quadro is surprising but I guess nobody buys computers from iphone Inc for serious graphics work these days anyway.
I think the machines will be very high performing machines but with no quad on the iMac, that is seriously bad to have your lowest quad core sitting at £1900 when PCs have them starting at £450.
Comments
The upgrade from 8x 2.2ghz to 8x 2.6ghz is $1400!!!
According to Intel pricing at Xbitlabs.com, a 4-core 2.26 Nehalem Xeon (E5520) chip is $373 (in quantities of 1000). The 4-core 2.66 Nehalem Xeon (E5550) chip is $958. The Intel price difference for two chips is $1170. But Apple could be getting a much better price (like $300 or less) on the Mac Pro standard 2.26 chips since they're buying those in much larger quantities than the Mac Pro optional 2.66 chip, moving the price differential over $1300.
So yes Apple is taking a piece, but almost all of the cost difference is attributable to the Intel pricing.
You can upgrade the Mac Pro to 32GB of memory, not 8GB.
Single 4 core option maxes out at 8 GB. If you choose 8 core option then you can upgrade to 32 GB.
LOL... I was thinking the exact same thing.
My 8c Dual 2.8, 14gig Ram is looking pretty sweet right now.
Here is the real kicker... what are the benchmarks going to say when Snow Leopard comes out?
Talk about hitting a wall... 8 times.
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
As usual, all you people do is complain.
Sorry, we're not all sycophants here.
I would think that anyone needing more than 8G of RAM isn't going to buy the 4 core processor and Apple is probably trying to keep the costs down, since adding connectors, etc. to offer 32G of RAM is more expensive.
Well, some apps are more memory than CPU starved (lightroom and photoshop as examples; running filters isn't a most-of-the-time sort of thing, but memory is always beneficial). 4 cores and lots of memory is a valid use space.
And I wonder how 4-core 2.66 is vs. 8-core 2.33 on existing programs that may not always be cleanly multithreaded...
If it is cost saving, it is not really reflected in the Mac Pro price ;-)
I was wondering why they removed the 15,000 RPM drive option when they have benchmarks on Apple's MacPro site for read/write speed tests using both 15,000 and 7,200 RPM drives for those tests.
Don't they realize that people need the 15K drives for video apps?
It's a little odd that Apple has been removing pro options...however, any self-respecting person would buy the absolute base (and just play around with the processor options) and buy memory and storage from some place that isn't hell-bent on ripping its customers off.
It pains me to see what Apple is charging its customers for HD and RAM upgrades.
My point was about the (again) lack of any upgradeability options on what is supposed to be a "tower" type machine.
Which is flat out false.
Sure, you can't easily upgrade the CPU (but I suspect it is possible with a little work), but you keep ignoring that you can easily upgrade ram, hard drives, and PCI cards.
And while you're not happy that each new generation uses different ram and CPU slot, that doesn't make the ram any less upgradable, just not backwards compatible which is an entirely different issue. And that's exactly the same situation as the PCs that use the exact same chips and motherboards.
Is the 8GB limit a cynical ploy to push us up to the 8 core machines, or really the best engineering compromise possible with Nehalem?
From what I have read, the eight slots are divided between four each for each of the two CPUs, so with one CPU you can only access four of the slots. I'm not sure what's up with maxing out with 2G chips instead of 4G, or if that's a false limitation.
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
But is the new quad really faster than the old 8 core (which Apple is trying to pass off as an "upgrade")?
If I get two new Apple LED 24" displays to go with the new Mac Pro, I assume I'll have to plug one in the Mini DP port and one in the DVI (through an adaptor). By doing this, will the signal/display quality and frequency across the two displays match? Or will the one plugged in the DVI via adaptor be slightly worse?
If so, can both displays somehow (though an alternate adaptor) be plugged into the one Mini DP port?
Know what I mean?
You can't add a second 24" display unless you add a second card.
I think this image shows a dual processor version of the case, there's two heatsinks.
This picture from the front page only has one heatsink:
Also, the motherboard seems to be in two parts, as the lower part can slide out so you can add memory. Seems a little over-the-top seeing as it's fairly accessible anyway! Any other reason they've done it like this? Maybe the heatsinks are too heavy to support with the mobo vertical.
Incidently, the specs say you can have up to 4x nVidia GT120 cards to support up to 8 displays. I wonder if this is using 10.5.7, as the drivers for the GT120 and HD4870 weren't in 10.5.6, afaik.
I wouldn't call it over the top. They needed more motherboard space and Ive's design team apparently wasn't going to budge on the case, so they did what Apple engineer do best (but seem to not have much opportunity with the slim is are only concern): Innovate. The DIMMs could not be on riser cards, so they put the CPUs on a big quick-path connected riser card and made it easier to access the memory CPUs. I just which they had the opportunity make it a bit wider for the additional DIMMs. I really like how they designed so you could work on it without having to tip it on its side.
NO SLI: No Tesla, No massive OpenCL.
What the hell?
Give me this beautiful system with 3 Full-size PCI-Express 2.0 slots.
Personally, I'd rather have a machine that is stable and works, rather than tinkering around with alternate processors and motherboards and then being frustrated when i get a blue screen of death. Luckily, I'm a Mac, and I am just happy in my land of productivity and creativity.
"You're a Mac" WTF does that mean!! Don't be an idiot like the win users running around saying "I'm a PC." The people in the ads are metaphors for the actual computers NOT for users!
Sorry for ranting. Pet peeve of mine.
Carry on....
Couldn't they have done something, anything to distinguish it from it's 6 year old design?
Its hard to perfect...."perfection".
Still a sexy looking cabinet.
You can't add a second 24" display unless you add a second card.
The apple webpage says that you can have two monitors on one card, one with dvi and one with displayport. Eight monitors max with four cards.
If you honestly think the Xeon in your old machine and the ones in the new Mac Pro are even remotely similar you're fooling yourself. The Nehalem procs are light years ahead of the old Xeons. They're like night and day.
It looks like Nehalem is 50% to 100% faster than harpertown when matched clock for clock.
http://forum.xcpus.com/intel/14750-n...pec-tests.html
Finally Apple has put up the prices. Thus targeting even more for the rich people amongst us. I feel a lot more exclusive now. Don't people get it. Apple makes products for rich people not for poor people scraping money from their backs to finally have saved up enough to make a "big" purchase.
Get over it. If you have a Mac be glad to have entered into an elite group cheap. I you don't, then don't bother. It's just for rich people. Buy a Dell computer. Don't put your hat where you can't reach it.
/JERK
I think we are paying Apples lawsuits, don't you think?
Let's hack some more.
Or maybe we should just be content with the mac we have at the moment or use a PC for a while.
Nehalem is a great CPU and it's great Apple is getting first dibs, but with their recent promotion of GPU technology, their inability to outfit the Mac Pro with a high-end GPU is disappointing.
Does that $149 HD4870 card include displayPort?
And that's too bad.
I just did two things I never do when a new model comes out.
One, I ordered it the first day.
Two, I ordered the middle speed model instead of the top model. Dual 2.66 GHz cpus will have to do for now. The dual 2.93 GHz model is even too expensive for me, now that I'm retired.
One, I ordered it the first day.
Grats!
I figured that, that was my mistake. That actually does suck. Why take away the expandability options for the Mac Pro? That doesn't make much sense, especially for a Professional Machine.
For some reason, the single cpu model doesn't accept the 4GB memory modules. Otherwise, you could go to 16 GB.
The other reason is that memory slots are limited per processor. One chip, 4 slots.
I wonder whether the still very expensive 4GB sticks WILL work, just that Apple isn't saying so. This has happened before, so it's a possibility they just haven't tested the machine with them, as people buying the machine are limited by cost, so expensive memory is likely something that Apple figures they won't be buying.
Damn, the single CPU is pricey. It's using a Xeon 3500 and they have the price points as the regular Core i7s.
I'm really shocked about the prices. You can buy or build a faster Core i7 for half that. And only 8GB of RAM? Even the 4 slot Intel board supports up to 16GB. I think you can probably put in 4GB DIMMs in there and get 16GB. I hope.
Those prices are shocking. You were previously able to buy a quad 2.66 for £1470 or something. Now the entry level quad 2.66 model is £1899. Over £400 increase.
GPUs are also disappointing although we've yet to see what they'll be capable of. I'd personally rather have a reliable GPU that runs cool enough than one that freezes up like the old X1900XTs.
The lack of a Quadro is surprising but I guess nobody buys computers from iphone Inc for serious graphics work these days anyway.
I think the machines will be very high performing machines but with no quad on the iMac, that is seriously bad to have your lowest quad core sitting at £1900 when PCs have them starting at £450.