New Mac Pro

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  • Reply 41 of 331
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacTac View Post


    Look up the definition of modular then get back with us.



    "an approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts (modules) that can be independently created and then used in different systems to drive multiple functionalities."



    There is no requirement for matching in a modular system. The whole point is that you can scale your system to as much or as little as you want.



    If you want a media centre then buy the entry model and it's as small and quiet as it needs to be, you can even fit it in a car. If you want a powerful machine, buy the quad i7 server, an external GPU, a RAID system and multiple monitors.



    If you want an average gaming system, buy the model with the dedicated GPU.



    A Mac Mini suits more uses than a mid-tower ever could and you can walk into a store and walk out with it in a bag. You can't do that with a mid-tower.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacTac View Post


    I'm still amazed at the number of people who praise the look, feel and design of Apple products but then turn around and don't understand why some of us want to have internal capacity so that the Apple product we bought doesn't get surrounded by stuff that doesn't match.



    So buy stuff that matches:



    http://g-technology.com/products/g-raid.cfm



    Your display isn't likely going to match the machine anyway or Time Machine drive or desk/chair/carpet etc. Express your individuality.



    If everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by snoopy


    I was referring to a new, lower cost case, which has been the point of most of this discussion.



    Oh, I thought when you said "It would seem that using the same case as the workstation Mac Pro should give Apple an easy way to develop such a mainstream product", that meant using the same case as the Mac Pro.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by snoopy


    If Apple makes an effort to lower the manufacturing cost of the Mac Pro, and can make a less expensive, low end model with a new motherboard being the only difference, then it seems like a no-brainer to do it.



    We've been over this many times. Apple used to sell the Mac Pro for $1999 and when the 27" iMac came in, jacked up the price by $500 despite not changing the value of any of the internals.



    The processor they sell in the $2500 entry model is $294. Other manufacturers sell Xeon workstations for half the price:



    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883147514



    The cost isn't in the motherboard or the CPU or the $200 GPU. They just put that sticker on the box because that's what they feel makes it profitable to even bother making one. If they can still make $700 profit from the 5% of buyers who want internal expansion or $150 for everyone who wants a matte screen on a laptop, they'll do it.



    In the end, they are driving people in a certain direction. Thunderbolt is there to drive people away from using PCI cards. The iMac is there to stop the mainstream buying towers and matching them with crappy displays. The Macbook Air is there to kill off optical and drive people to ultraportable machines.



    They could build a giant plastic laptop with Atom CPUs, VGA port, a 20-in-1 card reader, a big ugly power brick and sell it for $300 and increase marketshare by hitting a certain price point. But, they won't do it because it doesn't drive people in the right direction.



    In 2007, they could have built a phone that worked like everyone else's phone. Right now, they could build a mid-range tower like everyone else's tower. In both scenarios, everyone else is building it wrong. Within 10 years, the tower form factor will be dead.
  • Reply 42 of 331
    mactacmactac Posts: 316member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    "an approach that subdivides a system into smaller parts (modules) that can be independently created and then used in different systems to drive multiple functionalities."



    There is no requirement for matching in a modular system. The whole point is that you can scale your system to as much or as little as you want.



    First and second definitions in Websters:



    1: of, relating to, or based on a module or a modulus

    2: constructed with standardized units or dimensions for flexibility and variety in use <modular furniture>



    So again, show me the other matching devices that Apple sells that are meant to go along with the mini.



    There aren't any and there are no third party devices that meet definition two.
  • Reply 43 of 331
    macroninmacronin Posts: 1,174member
    Quote:

    …such quibbling over semantics may seem petty stuff.



    LOL… That's from the built-in Mac Dictionary app… ;^p



    I agree with Marvin, modular building blocks is the way to go…



    Yeah, the parts don't match up all pretty-like, but give Apple & the third-party folks some time…



    Many mock-ups of modular Mac computing devices have been around on the IntarWebz, it will eventually 'get there'…



    I like the idea of a Mac mini Server (for the fastest available CPU in a Mini) and an external Thunderbolt expansion chassis holding the fastest gaming GPU available for the Mac platform in card form. I would feed the output from the video card to an input on the receiver that comes with the excellent Onkyo 9600-series THX HTiB; Home Theater in (a) Box); from there to a 60" Panasonic HDTV (1920x1080p, natch…) Attach gaming peripherals (mouse, keyboard & keypad) from Razer… (WoW will be sweet…!), a FireWire 800 RAID array, USB video DVR dongle & an external Blu-Ray drive; BAM!, you have a complete media center… Feed wireless security cameras (accessed thru the Time Capsule radio if possible, attaching the Mini to the IntarWebz via hard wire to said Time Capsule) to the rig and be able to check around the house from the comfort of the couch…



    Would you ba able to do all this with a shiny new (rackmountable) Mac Pro…?!? Yes, but for the cost of that Mac Pro & it's upgrades internals; you could 'kit out' the entire MODULAR Mac mini (Server) Rube Goldberg device… Hide it all behind some sliding panels under the flat-panel, I won't tell…!



    ;^p



    EDIT SECTION



    After thinking about the mid-line Mac mini model (with the dedicated GPU), I arrived at this list and ballpark dollar amount for a decent MODULAR media center & WoW gaming machine:



    Mac mini (2.7GHz dual-core i7 CPU, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 750GB HDD, AMD Radeon HD 6630M w/256MB GDDR5 RAM)

    external SuperDrive

    AppleCare

    Apple Remote

    Three (3) Belkin High Speed HDMI cables (6 feet)

    Three (3) Moshi Gigabit CAT 6 Ethernet cables (12 feet)

    One (1) Apple Thunderbolt cable (2 meters)

    Razer Naga Epic gaming mouse

    Razer BlackWidow Ultimate gaming keyboard

    Elgato EyeTV HD Video Recorder

    Promise 12TB R6 Thunderbolt RAID array

    Apple TV

    3GB Time Capsule

    HP Envy 100 All-in-One printer



    That all totals just over US$5,500…



    Add in the 60" Panasonic HDTV & Onkyo THX HTiB (and a spool of some decent Monster speaker wire & banana clips, as the speaker connections that come in the box need improving on…); you are still coming in at under US$10,000… That may seem like a lot, but you are saving thousands over the cost of doing the same with the low-end Mac Pro model…



    (Yeah, the spec changed from an external Blu-Ray to an Apple SuperDrive; either find yourself an external Blu-Ray, or use the PlayStation 3, which is the device using the third HDMI & Gigabit CAT 6 cables…)



    Flame away, or praise me for doing the initial legwork and start calling around for pricing on the flat-panel & Onkyo systems…! ;^p
  • Reply 44 of 331
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacRonin View Post


    After thinking about the mid-line Mac mini model (with the dedicated GPU), I arrived at this list and ballpark dollar amount for a decent MODULAR media center & WoW gaming machinep



    Play WoW on that and you get yourself a barbecue and short lifetime computer due to thermal levels.
  • Reply 45 of 331
    macroninmacronin Posts: 1,174member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by LoganHunter View Post


    Play WoW on that and you get yourself a barbecue and short lifetime computer due to thermal levels.



    Which is why I would rather go the Mac mini Server route (faster quad-core CPU) with an external Thunderbolt chassis housing something like a nVidia GeForce GTX 580 (or the 590, if it will utilize both GPUs in OS X & WoW?)



    But I will have to wait and see how such a rig (mainly the external Thunderbolt chassis) actually works in real life?
  • Reply 46 of 331
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacRonin View Post


    Which is why I would rather go the Mac mini Server route (faster quad-core CPU) with an external Thunderbolt chassis housing something like a nVidia GeForce GTX 580 (or the 590, if it will utilize both GPUs in OS X & WoW?)



    But I will have to wait and see how such a rig (mainly the external Thunderbolt chassis) actually works in real life?



    And how much is it going to cost? An external bay + Graphics card wont be cheap. Moreover, not every graphics card will be compatible with OS X due to lack of drivers, which sucks
  • Reply 47 of 331
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member
    For professionals especially in office settings a stationary form factor should last for some time. Overall these kinds of machines have longer service lives. They don't have to dump a lot of design money into it, but they could keep it up to date and use hardware appropriate to the price point of the machine. There's just nothing special to the mac pros beyond that they run OSX, and they're a terrible value. This has to account for some portion of the shift.
  • Reply 48 of 331
    macroninmacronin Posts: 1,174member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by LoganHunter View Post


    And how much is it going to cost? An external bay + Graphics card wont be cheap. Moreover, not every graphics card will be compatible with OS X due to lack of drivers, which sucks



    Still cheaper than the low-end Mac Pro?



    Seeing as how I am used to playing WoW on my current setup (see sig), I think a 2GHz quad-core i7, 8GB RAM, (booting & loading apps from?) a 256GB SSD & the fastest gaming GPU card for the Mac available should just be all upgrade?!



    I SO wanna play WoW on a 60" HDTV, as opposed to my 13.3" laptop screen?!
  • Reply 49 of 331
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacRonin View Post


    Still cheaper than the low-end Mac Pro?



    Yep, the ViDock is $200-280 and a Thunderbolt model is coming and a Radeon 5770 can be bought for $200, GTX 285 is similar. So say $450 to match the Mac Pro graphics and you are still $1000 cheaper even with the server Mini.
  • Reply 50 of 331
    sequitursequitur Posts: 1,910member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post


    Yep, the ViDock is $200-280 and a Thunderbolt model is coming and a Radeon 5770 can be bought for $200, GTX 285 is similar. So say $450 to match the Mac Pro graphics and you are still $1000 cheaper even with the server Mini.



    What boxes would you use to house those items and what would the set up look like?
  • Reply 51 of 331
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by sequitur View Post


    What boxes would you use to house those items and what would the set up look like?







    The dock is the black device just to the left of the laptop. The Mini would sit next to it. Much more compact than a giant workstation yet $1000 cheaper and equally powerful.
  • Reply 52 of 331
    snoopysnoopy Posts: 1,901member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Marvin View Post






    The dock is the black device just to the left of the laptop. The Mini would sit next to it. Much more compact than a giant workstation yet $1000 cheaper and equally powerful.



    My Mac Pro sits on the floor and takes up no desk space. The desktop has keyboard, mouse and monitor. By the way, the Mac Pro with keyboard and mouse cost me $920, used, and with its four cores and 5 GB of RAM it performs well enough for what I do. It has a built-in wireless network module and room to add more hard drives without having cables to each one.
  • Reply 53 of 331
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by snoopy View Post


    My Mac Pro sits on the floor and takes up no desk space. The desktop has keyboard, mouse and monitor. By the way, the Mac Pro with keyboard and mouse cost me $920, used, and with its four cores and 5 GB of RAM it performs well enough for what I do. It has a built-in wireless network module and room to add more hard drives without having cables to each one.



    You can put the box along with a Mini on the floor if your prefer and it will use less floor space than a Mac Pro. Old Mac Pros aren't too bad but there's no warranty and anything before a MacPro revision 4 is going to be slower than a quad i7. The original quads are less than half the speed so if you want better performance per dollar, it's not a good option. Good for storage, not bad for GPUs as long as you don't get a compatibility issue.
  • Reply 54 of 331
    macroninmacronin Posts: 1,174member
    I would place it all tucked away in a cabinet underneath the 60" Panasonic HDTV that would be my monitor…



    And then I would get my Slice & Dice on playing my Combat Rogue in WoW…!
  • Reply 55 of 331
    phongphong Posts: 219member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by MacRonin View Post


    Which is why I would rather go the Mac mini Server route (faster quad-core CPU) with an external Thunderbolt chassis housing something like a nVidia GeForce GTX 580 (or the 590, if it will utilize both GPUs in OS X & WoW?)



    But I will have to wait and see how such a rig (mainly the external Thunderbolt chassis) actually works in real life?



    Wait, this is really something we can expect to see in the future? Graphics card upgrades via Thunderbolt? How long until something like this is real?



    I'd forget all about the Mac Pro.
  • Reply 56 of 331
    MarvinMarvin Posts: 15,310moderator
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Phong View Post


    Wait, this is really something we can expect to see in the future? Graphics card upgrades via Thunderbolt? How long until something like this is real?



    I'd forget all about the Mac Pro.



    I think we're looking at Q4 for Sonnet's product but no price yet. I'd guess the ViDock could be a little way out given that they just decided to do it in the last couple of weeks.



    http://www.holdan.co.uk/Sonnet/Stora...ab=description

    http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ViD...hen,13201.html



    There is an FAQ at the bottom of this page that suggests it could be ready by October:



    http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?to...134#post128355



    It seems plausible given that they already have a working ExpressCard product so they just have to change the chipsets. Power consumption is the concern with these things because you need multiple power supplies for higher powered GPUs. I personally wished someone would make an MXM Thunderbolt socket and have an internal 100W PSU - something that resembled an XBox PSU and just sat on the floor with Mini-DP and HDMI out. AMD/NVidia could have made branded ones and sold them cheaper given that there aren't two companies taking profits for the socket and GPU.
  • Reply 57 of 331
    welshdogwelshdog Posts: 1,897member
    Any possibility Thunderbolt could be used to connect either Minis or Mac Pro together to form a high speed cluster? In the past this has been done with Infiniband and similar tech, but it seems to me with custom drivers etc this could be done with TB. A bunch of Minis ganged together would make a nice render farm and be fairly cheap. Well, cheap in Mac universe anyway.
  • Reply 58 of 331
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by WelshDog View Post


    Any possibility Thunderbolt could be used to connect either Minis or Mac Pro together to form a high speed cluster?



    A cluster of more than two machines would require a hub/switch of some type.



    More importantly I'm not sure how the machines would identify each other. By this I mean the ports would have to be identified in some way as a networking device. It is an interesting question though because it was my understanding that devices on a TB chain can do peer to peer.

    Quote:

    In the past this has been done with Infiniband and similar tech, but it seems to me with custom drivers etc this could be done with TB. A bunch of Minis ganged together would make a nice render farm and be fairly cheap. Well, cheap in Mac universe anyway.



    Don't forget your GigaBit Ethernet port.



    In any event I think I have to agree such a platform would be nice for those that need it. You would get a very low power node with decent performance. The savings in power over traditional boxes should make for the price Fairly quickly. The big question though is can the Mini sustain the clock speed with that little enclosure.
  • Reply 59 of 331
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Phong View Post


    Wait, this is really something we can expect to see in the future? Graphics card upgrades via Thunderbolt? How long until something like this is real?



    Not likely, Thunderbolt is only 4 lanes of PCI-Express -- not nearly enough to support a GTX580 or any other 'gaming' class GPU.



    Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt_(interface)
  • Reply 60 of 331
    hmmhmm Posts: 3,405member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by nfcClue View Post


    Hi guys,



    here are some thoughts for discussion for the next Mac Pro:



    - general concept: a radically new design that will redefine the Mac Pro

    - no optical drive bays

    - built-in flash memory for OS and Apps

    - 3 additional 3.5" drive-bays (with hot-swap?)

    - no slots, Thunderbolt will make up for this

    - way smaller case

    - lower price point

    - release: October 2011 (maybe at a special Mac event?)



    As with Final Cut Pro X, professionals will cry out foul!



    Thoughts?



    This is so far off the mark I don't even know what to say. The optical drive thing there's no real reason to cut them on workstations yet unless you're actually going to do something with the space. Some people still use them and you don't gain anything removing them from the current case. I'm not sure the cases cost that much to manufacture. They aren't the cnc style of the laptop lines so it shouldn't be that terrible. I don't think their design team will be bothered with a product line like this. Apple has shown previously they can afford to alienate professionals. Many of them will continue to operate within OSX due to software licenses alone unless the selection of replacement machines becomes unusable.



    Thunderbolt won't make up for lack of PCI slots. SAS, eSATA, capture cards for video, and cards like the Red Rocket are just that, cards. Thunderbolt doesn't have the slots, or the throughput considering that it shares its bandwidth with external displays. Adapters do even exist currently. If you use it to make a living, it has to work today.



    Anyway the mac pro seems like something that will stay much like it is until they drop the product line or merge it with another.
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