8-Cylinder Mac Pro arrived!

my 3.0G 8 core beast arrived yesterday. It took 2 hours to plug in, not because it didn't work, but because it was so stunningly beautiful to look at....i forgot it was a computer. Even caught myself running my fingers over it like it was a girl. (There's my confession for the day. most of you have done worse

The case is a work of art, with a big apple-logo-embossed metal door that pops right off, a great weight and size to smack any apple-hater upside the head. Inside is more beautiful steel. I have to get RAM for it, we all know Apple's RAM prices are a bit high (as is any commodity that changes with the market).

For SL, it worked well out of the box with Windlight, but the default 1G of RAM was obvious, so I had to stay in less-populated areas. Client prefs are maxed out in graphics, running the 8800 video card out to a 24" monitor at 1920 resolution. The machine runs dead silent. Assuming it's liquid-cooled.

My personal smoke test on the machine will be how many bloated, oversized multimedia apps I can run at once, and how fast I can switch across them.

The apps i'll be running are (in no particular order) Photoshop, Illustrator, Flex, Flash, a few Ruby & Python dev environments (day job), Logic, Reason, NI's Komplete bundle, Rhino or Maya (havent decided), and about 40,000 little apps and widgets. oh yeah, and SL

I'll keep you posted.

The lowest end model ships with 2GB RAM... that's what you meant, right?

Congrats on your shiny new Mac, BTW.

Congratulations!

A heads-up - You need the current Photoshop, the CS3 version (either the 2D or expanded 3D version is fine), to run on Leopard. Versions of Photoshop prior to CS3 won't work, and must be upgraded. I also found Microsoft Excel didn't work. You need the new Office 2008 version fo Excel to work fully on Leopard. (Excel would open, but couldn't print.)

The rest of my apps seem quite happy running on my Mac Pro.

ok yeah 2G, i plan on 8. thanks for the heads-up, just saved a little money. haha

got em! Yeah im not going to allow any Rosetta-based apps to run on here. Theres a few music app's that arent quite ready for leopard either. i have a macbookpro (with a openGL-friendly older ATI chipset thank god) still running Tiger for those needs.

And the beta of Rhinoceros crashes like a drug addict. but thats expected atm.

Still waiting on mine with the 8800 GT as well, though mine's the 3.2ghz model.
I've got myself an extra 8gb of RAM to bring me to a nice cool 10gb, plus four 750gb hard-drives I'm going to stripe together (and a nice big disk for Time Machine)

Damn that RAM is pricey. Unfortunately 800MHz FBDIMMs are top-shelf right now until they become the standard, so i'll be running at 6GB for a while til the prices drop. Luckily Intel stated that this is the path theyre taking with RAM so prices shoudl drop soon.

for the record the best price i found was at NewEgg.com, about 40% less than anywhere else. A 4Gig (2x2G) kit was about $240.

Also, noticed some OpenGL-ish issues with Second Life, lots of flashing on the water, colored-pinwheel freezes where it looks like things are pricessing fine on the server but the client has to catch up (usually when there's other avatars around). I know there are a lot of nvidia/apple/sl/openGL problems being ironed out--im aware it's a beta on a new computer on a new OS. That being said, not a bad job at this point IMO

Unless you are doing some amazingly processor-intensive applications, I can't imagine you need all that RAM.

I am a designer who runs the entire CS3 suite (Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Dreamweaver, illustrator, etc.), a heavy SL user, and a audio engineer who runs Pro Tools, and I do it all on my MBP with 2GB of RAM, with mostly no problems. No, I don't run all those apps at once... why would I?

But you have a great computer in any case. Congrats.

thanks! i bought it exactly for processor-intensive applications. And yeah, i tend to run em all at once. Discovered this right in SL actually, making an interactive sound environment. I was trying to run Logic, Reason + tons of plugins, Photoshop, Illustrator, Blender & SL at once. I didnt have to, but the purpose of this rather expensive computer is to try and get it to keep up with the way I want to work, which in my ideal world means i can just make a big mess

i have a MPB as well, and I love it. never had a problem.

I hear you. Why have a supercomputer if you can't push the pedal to the metal, right?

For the way I work/play, it's just not necessary to have all that going at once, but I've been amazed at how my MBP does handle multitasking without hiccuping.

Mine arrived on Friday and I've got it all about set up and it is *sweet*. SL runs at about 20 frames-per-second at the /least/ in places I've tested so far, with the upper limit being above 50 fps. On my Dual 2.5ghz G5 20 fps was about typical.
This is using the Windlight viewer, on my G5 I had a mix between mid and high settings, I'm now on Ultra all the way. Strangely the 8800 seems to perform better with anisotropic filtering enabled than it does with it disabled, which is strange!

As for the RAM, I find myself typically working with large (5gb+) images in Photoshop, it makes a HUGE difference. An image-resize that would two to three minutes on the G5 takes about 10 seconds on the Mac Pro. May not sound a lot but when you consider how many filters you can use in Photoshop it adds up!
I got my RAM from otherworldcomputing.com, I didn't think the 2 x 4gb chips were that bad for price personally. Memory bandwidth is about two times what my G5 had, plus it's now all fully-buffered and error correcting, can't really complain!

Is that 20FPS including the 10.5.2 and GPU update? Because I noticed a pretty decent increase in FPS after I installed that update in my MacBook Pro. Also I noticed that in Leopard, SL uses both CPU cores evenly... pretty awesome.

*faints*

Yeah that's right, I installed all updates available when my Mac arrived, so I can't give you a comparison to how it was before those updates.

Before the Graphics updater, there were a lot of client-side hangups. a script would execute, id see a pinwheel for a minute, then find myself on the other side of the island. that kind of stuff.

Hangups are still present but they now only last for a few seconds instead of 30-60, and much much rarer.

I'm rollin my V8 on 2x24's and occasionally spread the client across the 2 monitors with no problems.

still get choppy avatars in a packed sim, but i've written off that as the nature of SL by this point. too much client/server delegation going on


that being said, SL can be easily maxed on a $500 PC. but what blew me away was being able to run SL on a 24" monitor at max resolution and settings while working in countless other CPU-hungry apps simultaneously. The CPU meter was like "oh yeah? something's going on? didnt notice"

I know, isn't it nice?



Yeah, that's just SL, regardless of your platform, software, RAM, or any other factor you can attempt to control.




Okay, quit bragging before we come storm your home and commandeer that system.

dont worry, in about 3 years, i'll be stuck witha slow 50-pound hunka junk

Really ? Ive been using CS2 for a long time and after upgrading to 10.5.2, I just reinstalled it (I did a clean install fro verious reasons before the 10.5.2 update).

I have had zero problems with CS2.