the part about listing the quad g5 for sale in dec2007 is odd, but i don't think it's an odd comparison. many people bought the quad g5 to tide them over through the intel transition, just like i did. i'm happy to see the comparisons. there was so much confusion when the mac pros came out because CS was running in rosetta. so the mac pros weren't faster. even when it went native, the photoshop tests were still close enough for most imaging professionals to just put off upgrading longer.
I agree. We all know that a new Intel platform will be faster than an older Intel platform and there are plenty of PC sites that will compare the most current and 2nd most current chips long before Apple puts them in their machines. But only Apple and its staunch consumer base will want to compare performance between PPC and Intel platforms.
Me too. And I decided to wait for the second generation of Mac Pros before buying one.
It'll be interesting to see what a Quad G5 will sell for on eBay, which is where mine is headed as soon as my new Mac Pro arrives.
i had an interesting turn of good luck/bad luck recently. my quad g5 started having serious issues. i had problems before which i thought were bad ram, but when i put the ram back to its stock configuration the machine was still having major issues. i took it to my apple store and they checked it in. report came back that one or more of the processors had gone bad. a week later they called me back to offer me a replacement machine, a macpro quad 2.66.
but since i had ordered the nvidia card on my quad g5 they were going to do the same for my macpro, which would delay the replacement computer order. of course, yesterday they upgraded the macpros to 8-core base. so i just called the apple store today and i'm happy to report that they've agreed to elevate my issue such that i will receive an 8-core 2.8 macpro as my new replacement machine. gotta love apple customer service.
Supposing that the only difference between the 3.2 and 2.8 GHz chips is sheer clock speed -- no architectural differences, no difference in cache sizes -- the 3.2 is 14% faster than the 2.8 for any task that's purely bound to CPU speed (and the 3.0 is 7% faster, of course).
Anything you do that has elements of disk I/O speed, bus speed, RAM speed, etc. -- i.e. most things you probably do -- won't see all of that 14% increase. Only a solid set of benchmarks will tell you how much for what tasks.
I really, really do like to buy the top-of-the-line models Apple makes. I'm typing this right now on my once top-of-the-line Quad G5. But I have to admit my craving for speed is not at all justified by any real-life business justification, or even any hobbyist uses that push my computer very hard. I just like nice toys.
But even though I like to spoil myself, in this case I just couldn't see spending the extra $1600, or even $800 dollars. I settled for the basic 8x2.8, with an extra optical drive, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 (which sadly bumps my shipping time from 3-5 days up to 3-5 weeks -- I keep thinking about canceling my order and changing that!), and a 500GB hard drive instead of 320GB. I'll add an additional 4GB of RAM myself at a much more reasonable price than Apple's price.
how come you just don't order it with the ATI graphics board and get it within several days and go out and buy a $285 8800GT retail and put it in. I'd pay an extra $85 to get it before 3-5 weeks.
the part about listing the quad g5 for sale in dec2007 is odd, but i don't think it's an odd comparison. many people bought the quad g5 to tide them over through the intel transition, just like i did. i'm happy to see the comparisons. there was so much confusion when the mac pros came out because CS was running in rosetta. so the mac pros weren't faster. even when it went native, the photoshop tests were still close enough for most imaging professionals to just put off upgrading longer.
Yeah, but it's pretty old now. It would make more sense to compare against an Intel based machine.
Obviously, I would get another router. But then I have to decide what to do with the internet gateway they gave me. Hooking one router to another is a pain to implement. I use an 8 port switch off the one I have now. 4 ports isn't enough.
If I get one, it will like be the Apple unit, as it gets the best ratings.
I just mentioned the use of the computer as an aside, as Apple says you can do that.
I agree. We all know that a new Intel platform will be faster than an older Intel platform and there are plenty of PC sites that will compare the most current and 2nd most current chips long before Apple puts them in their machines. But only Apple and its staunch consumer base will want to compare performance between PPC and Intel platforms.
I don't mind the comparison. It just isn't helpful when deciding whether to move from an older Intel model.
I agree that this will be done in other places. But a lot of people will see what Apple has put up and think, "Whut?".
how come you just don't order it with the ATI graphics board and get it within several days and go out and buy a $285 8800GT retail and put it in. I'd pay an extra $85 to get it before 3-5 weeks.
It doesn't work out of the box. You have to be able to find kludged Apple friendly firmware for it, and burn it to the board.
Yeah, but it's pretty old now. It would make more sense to compare against an Intel based machine.
they do that too. you can compare it against 3 machines. including the quad g5 makes a lot of sense and i'm sure they have data to back up that a lot of print professionals are still waiting it out on quad g5s. if mine hadn't broken i probably would have held on to it for at least another year.
I don't mind the comparison. It just isn't helpful when deciding whether to move from an older Intel model.
I agree that this will be done in other places. But a lot of people will see what Apple has put up and think, "Whut?".
Lots of shops still running G5s. I have three of them (first generation: DP2Ghz & DP1.8.) Heck, a printer I use still uses a graphite G4 for graphics work; apparently all he needs. One shop tried to get my business and listed their "up to date" equipment including a PM 8500!
Even a multi-billion dollar Fortune Five company I worked with just switched over to Intel Macs for their creative staffers, and these are people doing trade shows with 60 ft. square pavilions and fleets of corporate Gulfstreams.
That's one reason why these processors have so much cache.
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
I find it interesting that very few programs are specific enough to have that as a problem. Perhaps transaction processing.
Quote:
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
I think most people here know that.
Quote:
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
That's per Intel's specs. If one core isn't using the cache, the other core can.
Quote:
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
Is there a big performance difference between 2.8 vs 3.0 and between 3.0 vs. 3.2.
I know there should be a significant performance boost between 2.8 vs. 3.2 but is it really worth 1600? or is it really worth an extra $800 for a 200Mhz bump?
I don't do anything too hardcore graphics or video but I just want the biggest and best. I have two other PCs with quad cores and 8GB of ram and barely use its potential.
You won't see much of a difference under normal applications. Here's a few points to mention:
- CPU core clock (thus FSB speed to the North Bridge and DDR speed) are the same in all the systems. This means that, regardless of CPU multiplier, your data transfer rate outside the CPU is fixed.
- All three CPU steppings have the same cache size. Going to a faster CPU isn't gaining any internal storage space (which *would* speed up many applications).
- At relatively small CPU speed deltas, it is my opinion that RAM size/speed plays a larger role in perceived speed/response than the CPU speed. Money would be better spent upgrading to at least 4GB of RAM. HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster.
- Again with the RAM: If you can offload as much video computation to the video card, you're system will have more time to crunch other numbers - get a bigger video card if you like high-demand video applications and you're performance will go up.
Of course, if you just like having the biggest and best, then go for the 3.2GHz, but I think the better option is the spend half the money and bump the RAM.
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
The new north bridge (Seaburg) has a Snoop Filter with four affinity groups - one per atomic L2 cache block (i.e. 1 per 6MB block). This improves data-sharing latency across cores and physical sockets by intercepting memory requests and reducing superfluous and expensive reads/writes from main memory. Cache coherency management and data pre-fetching really speed up multi-threaded/multi-core computing, and that was one major upgrade Seaburg provided over the old Blackford/Greencreek architecture (the old Mac Pro's north bridge).
You won't see much of a difference under normal applications. Here's a few points to mention:
- CPU core clock (thus FSB speed to the North Bridge and DDR speed) are the same in all the systems. This means that, regardless of CPU multiplier, your data transfer rate outside the CPU is fixed.
- All three CPU steppings have the same cache size. Going to a faster CPU isn't gaining any internal storage space (which *would* speed up many applications).
- At relatively small CPU speed deltas, it is my opinion that RAM size/speed plays a larger role in perceived speed/response than the CPU speed. Money would be better spent upgrading to at least 4GB of RAM. HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster.
- Again with the RAM: If you can offload as much video computation to the video card, you're system will have more time to crunch other numbers - get a bigger video card if you like high-demand video applications and you're performance will go up.
Of course, if you just like having the biggest and best, then go for the 3.2GHz, but I think the better option is the spend half the money and bump the RAM.
What do you mean when you say:
"HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster."
"HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster."
Appreciate if you could elaborate
The computer will actually operate more quickly, but the CPU isn't really any faster on its own, you're taking away some of the delays that prevent it from doing its thing. If there's not enough memory, the computer will swap to hard drive to clear memory for new things. That will slow down the computer because it's waiting for the hard drive.
For a Mac Pro, I suggest 4GB or more. But I'd wait first, until third party memory is available because Mac Pro memory is specific to that kind of machine.
Comments
many people bought the quad g5 to tide them over through the intel transition, just like i did.
Me too. And I decided to wait for the second generation of Mac Pros before buying one.
It'll be interesting to see what a Quad G5 will sell for on eBay, which is where mine is headed as soon as my new Mac Pro arrives.
the part about listing the quad g5 for sale in dec2007 is odd, but i don't think it's an odd comparison. many people bought the quad g5 to tide them over through the intel transition, just like i did. i'm happy to see the comparisons. there was so much confusion when the mac pros came out because CS was running in rosetta. so the mac pros weren't faster. even when it went native, the photoshop tests were still close enough for most imaging professionals to just put off upgrading longer.
I agree. We all know that a new Intel platform will be faster than an older Intel platform and there are plenty of PC sites that will compare the most current and 2nd most current chips long before Apple puts them in their machines. But only Apple and its staunch consumer base will want to compare performance between PPC and Intel platforms.
Me too. And I decided to wait for the second generation of Mac Pros before buying one.
It'll be interesting to see what a Quad G5 will sell for on eBay, which is where mine is headed as soon as my new Mac Pro arrives.
i had an interesting turn of good luck/bad luck recently. my quad g5 started having serious issues. i had problems before which i thought were bad ram, but when i put the ram back to its stock configuration the machine was still having major issues. i took it to my apple store and they checked it in. report came back that one or more of the processors had gone bad. a week later they called me back to offer me a replacement machine, a macpro quad 2.66.
but since i had ordered the nvidia card on my quad g5 they were going to do the same for my macpro, which would delay the replacement computer order. of course, yesterday they upgraded the macpros to 8-core base. so i just called the apple store today and i'm happy to report that they've agreed to elevate my issue such that i will receive an 8-core 2.8 macpro as my new replacement machine. gotta love apple customer service.
Supposing that the only difference between the 3.2 and 2.8 GHz chips is sheer clock speed -- no architectural differences, no difference in cache sizes -- the 3.2 is 14% faster than the 2.8 for any task that's purely bound to CPU speed (and the 3.0 is 7% faster, of course).
Anything you do that has elements of disk I/O speed, bus speed, RAM speed, etc. -- i.e. most things you probably do -- won't see all of that 14% increase. Only a solid set of benchmarks will tell you how much for what tasks.
I really, really do like to buy the top-of-the-line models Apple makes. I'm typing this right now on my once top-of-the-line Quad G5. But I have to admit my craving for speed is not at all justified by any real-life business justification, or even any hobbyist uses that push my computer very hard. I just like nice toys.
But even though I like to spoil myself, in this case I just couldn't see spending the extra $1600, or even $800 dollars. I settled for the basic 8x2.8, with an extra optical drive, the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 (which sadly bumps my shipping time from 3-5 days up to 3-5 weeks -- I keep thinking about canceling my order and changing that!), and a 500GB hard drive instead of 320GB. I'll add an additional 4GB of RAM myself at a much more reasonable price than Apple's price.
how come you just don't order it with the ATI graphics board and get it within several days and go out and buy a $285 8800GT retail and put it in. I'd pay an extra $85 to get it before 3-5 weeks.
the part about listing the quad g5 for sale in dec2007 is odd, but i don't think it's an odd comparison. many people bought the quad g5 to tide them over through the intel transition, just like i did. i'm happy to see the comparisons. there was so much confusion when the mac pros came out because CS was running in rosetta. so the mac pros weren't faster. even when it went native, the photoshop tests were still close enough for most imaging professionals to just put off upgrading longer.
Yeah, but it's pretty old now. It would make more sense to compare against an Intel based machine.
just get a real WiFi router like this with N and 5 gig-e ports
1 for the internet side and the other 4 for your network. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...&Sku=D700-5426
Obviously, I would get another router. But then I have to decide what to do with the internet gateway they gave me. Hooking one router to another is a pain to implement. I use an 8 port switch off the one I have now. 4 ports isn't enough.
If I get one, it will like be the Apple unit, as it gets the best ratings.
I just mentioned the use of the computer as an aside, as Apple says you can do that.
Me too. And I decided to wait for the second generation of Mac Pros before buying one.
It'll be interesting to see what a Quad G5 will sell for on eBay, which is where mine is headed as soon as my new Mac Pro arrives.
$1500 to $2000, depending on what's inside.
I agree. We all know that a new Intel platform will be faster than an older Intel platform and there are plenty of PC sites that will compare the most current and 2nd most current chips long before Apple puts them in their machines. But only Apple and its staunch consumer base will want to compare performance between PPC and Intel platforms.
I don't mind the comparison. It just isn't helpful when deciding whether to move from an older Intel model.
I agree that this will be done in other places. But a lot of people will see what Apple has put up and think, "Whut?".
how come you just don't order it with the ATI graphics board and get it within several days and go out and buy a $285 8800GT retail and put it in. I'd pay an extra $85 to get it before 3-5 weeks.
It doesn't work out of the box. You have to be able to find kludged Apple friendly firmware for it, and burn it to the board.
Yeah, but it's pretty old now. It would make more sense to compare against an Intel based machine.
they do that too. you can compare it against 3 machines. including the quad g5 makes a lot of sense and i'm sure they have data to back up that a lot of print professionals are still waiting it out on quad g5s. if mine hadn't broken i probably would have held on to it for at least another year.
I don't mind the comparison. It just isn't helpful when deciding whether to move from an older Intel model.
I agree that this will be done in other places. But a lot of people will see what Apple has put up and think, "Whut?".
Lots of shops still running G5s. I have three of them (first generation: DP2Ghz & DP1.8.) Heck, a printer I use still uses a graphite G4 for graphics work; apparently all he needs. One shop tried to get my business and listed their "up to date" equipment including a PM 8500!
Even a multi-billion dollar Fortune Five company I worked with just switched over to Intel Macs for their creative staffers, and these are people doing trade shows with 60 ft. square pavilions and fleets of corporate Gulfstreams.
8 core vs 4 cores for the mid line models.
Faster bus, faster memory, faster cpu's etc.
It's all theoretical.
We'll find out when they land in the sites hands and we see tests.
Yup. It's called Amdahl's Law. Study it before you believe "up to" speedup figures.
That's one reason why these processors have so much cache.
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
Yup. It's called Amdahl's Law. Study it before you believe "up to" speedup figures.
Familiar with that. Read it many years ago.
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
I find it interesting that very few programs are specific enough to have that as a problem. Perhaps transaction processing.
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
I think most people here know that.
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
That's per Intel's specs. If one core isn't using the cache, the other core can.
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
That I don't know.
Fridge? That looks more like a small apartment.
That's just what I was going to say! A lot bigger than my NYC closet space~!
Is there a big performance difference between 2.8 vs 3.0 and between 3.0 vs. 3.2.
I know there should be a significant performance boost between 2.8 vs. 3.2 but is it really worth 1600? or is it really worth an extra $800 for a 200Mhz bump?
I don't do anything too hardcore graphics or video but I just want the biggest and best. I have two other PCs with quad cores and 8GB of ram and barely use its potential.
You won't see much of a difference under normal applications. Here's a few points to mention:
- CPU core clock (thus FSB speed to the North Bridge and DDR speed) are the same in all the systems. This means that, regardless of CPU multiplier, your data transfer rate outside the CPU is fixed.
- All three CPU steppings have the same cache size. Going to a faster CPU isn't gaining any internal storage space (which *would* speed up many applications).
- At relatively small CPU speed deltas, it is my opinion that RAM size/speed plays a larger role in perceived speed/response than the CPU speed. Money would be better spent upgrading to at least 4GB of RAM. HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster.
- Again with the RAM: If you can offload as much video computation to the video card, you're system will have more time to crunch other numbers - get a bigger video card if you like high-demand video applications and you're performance will go up.
Of course, if you just like having the biggest and best, then go for the 3.2GHz, but I think the better option is the spend half the money and bump the RAM.
That doesn't help you if you are doing interprocessor communication which in any form needs to go through memory. If your processes or threads very seldom communicate and don't have shared data structures, big caches will keep data traffic off lower levels of the hierarchy. Otherwise, you have a big scalability problem.
If you are just running a multitasking workload with lots of busy little processes that have nothing to do with each other, as long as Apple has fixed the OS bottlenecks, you should be fine.
BTW I find the terminology of a "processor" as meaning a collection of cores unnecessarily obfuscatory. Apple's figures say 12MB per processor but if you check the fine print, this means 3MB per core, with 6MB shared between 2 cores (still good but not as huge as 12MB sounds). A "processor" in every computer architecture text and research paper I've read is the same thing as a core. The only technical difference between a multicore design and a multiprocessor design is that you eliminate some off-chip latencies between cores as compared with the same design with the cores on separate chips.
In Apple's web description, the statement "6MB of cache is shared between pairs of processor cores, allowing an individual core to use all the available shared cache at any one time" is kind of interesting. This means that if both cores sharing the cache are active they can both use all of the cache at the same time. Interesting. Must be some new spin on quantum computing
I wonder if Apple's scheduler is clever enough to schedule a pair of related processes or the first 2 threads of one process on cores with a shared cache... and up to 4 related processes or threads on one chip?
The new north bridge (Seaburg) has a Snoop Filter with four affinity groups - one per atomic L2 cache block (i.e. 1 per 6MB block). This improves data-sharing latency across cores and physical sockets by intercepting memory requests and reducing superfluous and expensive reads/writes from main memory. Cache coherency management and data pre-fetching really speed up multi-threaded/multi-core computing, and that was one major upgrade Seaburg provided over the old Blackford/Greencreek architecture (the old Mac Pro's north bridge).
You won't see much of a difference under normal applications. Here's a few points to mention:
- CPU core clock (thus FSB speed to the North Bridge and DDR speed) are the same in all the systems. This means that, regardless of CPU multiplier, your data transfer rate outside the CPU is fixed.
- All three CPU steppings have the same cache size. Going to a faster CPU isn't gaining any internal storage space (which *would* speed up many applications).
- At relatively small CPU speed deltas, it is my opinion that RAM size/speed plays a larger role in perceived speed/response than the CPU speed. Money would be better spent upgrading to at least 4GB of RAM. HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster.
- Again with the RAM: If you can offload as much video computation to the video card, you're system will have more time to crunch other numbers - get a bigger video card if you like high-demand video applications and you're performance will go up.
Of course, if you just like having the biggest and best, then go for the 3.2GHz, but I think the better option is the spend half the money and bump the RAM.
What do you mean when you say:
"HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster."
Appreciate if you could elaborate
Thx
Mike
What do you mean when you say:
"HD swapping is a UI response time's worst enemy. Eliminate swap and you're computer will *feel* faster."
Appreciate if you could elaborate
The computer will actually operate more quickly, but the CPU isn't really any faster on its own, you're taking away some of the delays that prevent it from doing its thing. If there's not enough memory, the computer will swap to hard drive to clear memory for new things. That will slow down the computer because it's waiting for the hard drive.
For a Mac Pro, I suggest 4GB or more. But I'd wait first, until third party memory is available because Mac Pro memory is specific to that kind of machine.