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02-01-2012, 12:14 PM
Save some money and get a used MacPro. You can get an 8-core 2009 (4,1) for $2000 and maybe less. Look around a little and you will find they have added ram and upgraded video cards for that price. I have six of those right now and they run great.
If warranty is mandatory, look at the refurbished MacPros from Apple.
Just a thought.
Dusty
02-01-2012, 02:15 PM
Thanks for the tip Barry.Originally Posted by Barry Bishop
I am looking to replace 7 older Mac Pros, but will take your advice and hang on a bit.
02-01-2012, 03:17 PM
You are very welcome, but I hope the OP will take my advice. Also got some intel from an intel exec....i9's are going to blow us all away
02-01-2012, 06:54 PM
Okay you convinced me. I'm going to get another sup'ed up iMac as a temp with 32 GB RAM. What SSD do you recommend I put in the iMac?
02-01-2012, 08:44 PM
OWC, they always seem good with their mac focused ssd drives:
http://otherworldcomputing.com/
02-01-2012, 09:40 PM
Like some have mentioned, hold on for a month, that's when the new Xeon E5 CPUs are incoming. However, if you are looking for a GTX 580 or otherwise planning to do graphically intensive work, Mac Pro is totally the wrong solution.
02-02-2012, 03:11 AM
Even if Intel is keeping to their roadmap it's not clear how quickly Apple will adopt the new chipsets. It can be July easily before you have the new MacPro in your possession. And then you work with a first generation box. I prefer to buy 2nd generation boxes. Most issues are sorted out by then, the graphics driver are working as expected and many other obstacles hopefully ironed out. This is often nit the case with a generation 1 box.
If you are after the latest, fastest etc... you must go PC. For many reasons I'm still on 10.6.8 on my MacPros. There are driver issues with Lion for instance. Will be a downgrade possible with new machines? I doubt that. I'm looking for reliability. Hence I let others do the beta testing with new hardware.
The idea to get a used MacPro with a Nvidia 4000/4800 is a good advice, IMHO. A thoroughly tested new workhorse from Apple will be available earliest late summer, IMHO. Nonetheless I'm convinced that it will be a clever buy again. Apple hardware rarely let me down.
Hans
02-02-2012, 06:27 AM
Biggest problem with the more powerful graphics cards isn't really the drivers - it's the fact that there's only two 6-pin power connectors on the motherboard. A lot of the bigger cards need a lot more power than what can be provided on those small ports. I saw there's a guy who is selling modified Quadro 6000 for Mac on eBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-Quadr...item4cfdca7fd5
02-02-2012, 08:47 AM
If you want an SSD in the iMac, go with the stock one from Apple. It's pretty good and a bit on the pricey side, but it will leave your warranty intact. Unlike the Mac Pro or the Macbook Pro, cracking open an iMac will void your warranty! Not to mention, it's a pain in the ass. It's not difficult, but it's just a pain. Seriously, I've done a couple of them and then bought an iMac for my family at Christmas. When it came to doing that, I just bought the SSD+2GB HDD configuration with minimum RAM from Apple, then bought RAM separately.
As for the Mac Pro, there is indeed some logic to waiting. The new CPUs are ready, the new chipsets are supposedly in production now, but Intel hasn't given all the final specs or confirmed delivery dates just yet. We are probably at least 30 days from a new Mac Pro, and quite possibly a lot more. There are a lot of rumors flying about them and many of the rumors are starting to align, it seems that the next Mac Pro will be smaller, sleeker, have ThunderBolt, have 2.5" bays for internal storage, possibly 2.5"/3.5" hybrid bays. But no one really knows for sure. There's quite a few people buying up the current Mac Pro now because they are unsure of what the next revision will bring. Personally, I'm waiting it out... But I'm up to my eyeballs in computers anyway and don't really need another one at the moment. As soon as Apple releases the new Mac Pro, I'll buy one... And I'll be building 2 or 3 Xeon PC's as well.
I'm also in pre-production for a big animation project and we'll be building our new render farm around the new Sandy Bridge Xeon architecture when it arrives.
GTX580 in a current Mac Pro is a waste of time. Available drivers can't use all the CUDA cores, you have to hack/flash the BIOS/EFI image to make it work anyway and there's the power issue that others have mentioned -- if you want to install a second video card. The 580 will use up both PCI power connectors. So you have to pull it from an optical bay or elsewhere. In my own experience in trying to do this, it leads to more problems. Best real-world video card on the Mac right now is the Quadro 4000 Mac Edition. But for some reason, they just keep getting more expensive. I bought several of them a year ago for around $615 each. They're close to $750 right now...
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