You may remember that I returned my Mac Pro for various issues. Well, I purchased another Mac Pro.
Since the SATA issues with Windows XP seem to have been fixed (truthfully I haven't even loaded XP outside of Parallels yet), and since I found a decent deal on a Mac Pro (basically I didn't lose any money from my return of the previous Mac Pro (had to pay the $250 restocking fee)), I jumped on it.
I wanted a mac still so I could run Aperture. So I purchased an iMac 20" and Aperture. I felt the performance on the iMac 20" was not as good as I would have wanted. Version 1.5 helped a lot, but it was still slower than I had hoped. Having only 2GB of ram I'm guessing was partially the issue. Aperture wants lots of RAM. It could also be the 128MB video card was a limiting factor in the speed.
Anyway, with the iMac I felt limited. If you think about it, it costs about the same to take an iMac from 1GB stock to 3GB as it does a Mac Pro from 1GB to 3GB. At that point, to me, it made no sense sticking with the iMac and upgrading to 3GB of ram.
So I ended up buying the following:
Mac Pro 2x2.66ghz
2 2GB kits (so a total of 4 1GB FB-DIMMS... from apple, so this was expensive)
ATI X1900 XT
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle the hard drives. Not sure if I want a raid 0 or not, and so on. I'll figure that out.
So let me tell you, this thing screams now.
A word of advice. If you're pondering buying a Mac Pro, do it the right way and make sure you upgrade the RAM at least. With 4GB of ram, it's night and day when you compare it to the stock 1GB of RAM. The X1900 XT is very fast too, but please do a RAM upgrade. Otherwise you're not using this machine to its full or even partial potential. I've learned that now.
I'm only running with the 4 1GB fb-dimms at the moment. I'm trying to figure out if I want to run with the extra 2 512's and possibly lose some performance because of the 256bit/128bit thing, or if I should buy another 2 512's and fill the sucker and get 6GB, or sell the 2 512's.
Anyway, it's good to be back. Hopefully i'll stick with it longer than I did last time!
Since the SATA issues with Windows XP seem to have been fixed (truthfully I haven't even loaded XP outside of Parallels yet), and since I found a decent deal on a Mac Pro (basically I didn't lose any money from my return of the previous Mac Pro (had to pay the $250 restocking fee)), I jumped on it.
I wanted a mac still so I could run Aperture. So I purchased an iMac 20" and Aperture. I felt the performance on the iMac 20" was not as good as I would have wanted. Version 1.5 helped a lot, but it was still slower than I had hoped. Having only 2GB of ram I'm guessing was partially the issue. Aperture wants lots of RAM. It could also be the 128MB video card was a limiting factor in the speed.
Anyway, with the iMac I felt limited. If you think about it, it costs about the same to take an iMac from 1GB stock to 3GB as it does a Mac Pro from 1GB to 3GB. At that point, to me, it made no sense sticking with the iMac and upgrading to 3GB of ram.
So I ended up buying the following:
Mac Pro 2x2.66ghz
2 2GB kits (so a total of 4 1GB FB-DIMMS... from apple, so this was expensive)
ATI X1900 XT
I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle the hard drives. Not sure if I want a raid 0 or not, and so on. I'll figure that out.
So let me tell you, this thing screams now.
A word of advice. If you're pondering buying a Mac Pro, do it the right way and make sure you upgrade the RAM at least. With 4GB of ram, it's night and day when you compare it to the stock 1GB of RAM. The X1900 XT is very fast too, but please do a RAM upgrade. Otherwise you're not using this machine to its full or even partial potential. I've learned that now.
I'm only running with the 4 1GB fb-dimms at the moment. I'm trying to figure out if I want to run with the extra 2 512's and possibly lose some performance because of the 256bit/128bit thing, or if I should buy another 2 512's and fill the sucker and get 6GB, or sell the 2 512's.
Anyway, it's good to be back. Hopefully i'll stick with it longer than I did last time!
