I bought my Powermac G5 1.8 single when I was 13. Had a paper route for a long time.xfiftyfour said:
True story, and a pic to prove it:
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Amazing, Rev. A!
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True story, and a pic to prove it:
Well it is a pretty big issue for a lot of professionals, including those who want to use Photoshop in Windows until it's universal on the Mac, develop PC and Mac versions of apps on the same computer, etc.mkrishnan said:
And a lot of people were just expecting it to be a kickass Windows machine, which it is except for that pretty significant SATA problem which mars it.
Nice man!Mr. Mister said:I bought my Powermac G5 1.8 single when I was 13. Had a paper route for a long time.
True story, and a pic to prove it:
gekko513 said:
I just bought the 20" with my Mac Pro. Sure I could have gotten the Dell 24" for $50 more, but I have limited desk space, limited need for all that real estate, and who wants to be looking at a Dell logo all day? I'm willing to pay a premium for the looks of the Apple display.
That's a shame, you could've paid a, uh, discount and gotten an NEC 20WMGX2 which is the best 20" screen available today.
c.hilding said:Hey,
Thanks for the (so far so good) replies!
The reason that I chose to stick with the default card is simple; it has passive cooling! Here's some advice: DO NOT BE TEMPTED to buy the X1900 unless you really want to play games at their maximum settings RIGHT NOW. It draws a lot of power, generates tremendous heat, and has a huge and likely noisy fan. So for a workstation I don't want that in there, and neither should you unless you're absolutely sure that you want to run heavy games today.
- 2x3.00 GHz Quad Xeon
- 2GB 667 DDR2 FB DIMM ECC - 4x512MB (The Mac Pro has four memory lanes; so for the best performance, use them all!)
- NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB SDRAM (The most power efficient card of them all. And it doesn't generate much heat so it's passively cooled and therefore silent.)
- 250GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive @ 7200 rpm (You need two drives for optimum performance, or three for backups. This is the operating system/applications drive.)
- 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive @ 7200 rpm (This is the project drive where all the large data files and program caches are stored.)
- 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive @ 7200 rpm (This is the Time Machine drive, which keeps everything backed up.)
- 16x SuperDrive DL (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW) (Do NOT get two superdrives, there will be HD-DVD drives in the near future and you'll need this slot.)
- Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
- Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse
- Mac OS X - Int'l English
- Apple Cinema HD Display (23" flat panel) (I couldn't bring myself to getting a Dell, even though a lot of people are doing that. Just looking at the Dell logo etched into the bezel while working on a Mac would make me want to take a shower.)
- AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro/Power Mac (Probably the wisest investment you can make, 3 years complete warranty.)
Which brings me to Windows. You (macgeek2005) and many others are reporting poor SATA performances while running Windows. How is this weird? You are running a preview of BootCamp, and none of Apples' Windows chipset drivers are final yet. They'll undoubtedly be improving them until the SATA throughput is up where it belongs. This issue has nothing to do with the hardware.
Thanks again everyone for all the replies!
I don't have my mac pro yet so I couldn't have reported bad performance in windows.
I am however planning on playing Doom 3, Quake 4, and Call of Duty 2 at 1920x1200 resolution all settings maxed out, and I don't want my framerate below 60. That's my reasoning for the X1900XT.
Mr. Mister said:That's a shame, you could've paid a, uh, discount and gotten an NEC 20WMGX2 which is the best 20" screen available today.
Sure it has better specs, but two things going against it landing on my desk. First, it doesn't match my computer as well. Second, it has some sort of shiny coat on it which doesn't match my taste.
amin said:
That "shiny coat" is called OptiClear and is a filter that boosts certain colors for a "WOW"-effect. It's purely a gimmick for idiots and no professional designer would ever use such a display, this particular one is a bit better than most as it doesn't deviate more than 5-10% from the true colors. However, there's more. The Black-levels are really bad, which affects the contrast negatively since it can't achieve good blacks. The controller chip is also very inaccurate which leads to it taking more than one frame to refresh the screen and achieve the right color for any given pixel. This in turn will lead to crushed colors as the brightness of a pixel gets ramped up over time, especially when the screen needs to be refreshed quickly such as when viewing videos or playing games. This color crushing is visible as unexpected artifacts, noise and flat out wrong colors.
Unexpected colors can and will show up here and there. So the advertised 6ms refresh rate is just another gimmick and has severe cutbacks as the chip tries to swap all the pixels in that quick of a refresh rate but failing miserably. It also has horrible backlighting, it's very uneven. Check this link. The bad contrast, uneven backlight, false color representation, color artifacts, and the black colors looking more like gray means I can't recommend it to anyone.
There are a few redeeming qualities however, but not enough to compensate for the drawbacks: The brightness goes high enough that you need to wear sunglasses, the colors are vibrant and "fun" if you're a gamer, and many people won't know what to look for in a display so they won't see how bad it is, and of course it's very cheap (you get what you pay for though). All in all, this display is only recommended for office use or casual gamers. So sorry Mr. Mister, this is very far from "the best 20 inch screen available today".