Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

What do you do with your Mac Pro?

Goftrey said:
That's reassuring. What graphics card is in there? I recently picked up an '06 2.66GHz w/ 6GB RAM, and I'll stick my 6570 in there for now. Is it a decent system? How does it fare up against your MacBook (forgetting 4GB vs 16GB RAM)?
Click to expand...

attachment.php


I'd say it's a little bit better but, it wants to "hang" every once in awhile. Granted, I'm spoiled with my SSD in my Macbook and the MP has an old 320G sata in it. I'm sure if I had a SSD drive, I'd say it was a LOT faster.

I know it plays Diablo III a lot better but, that's graphics mostly. By far the fast (and best running) system (for home) I've ever owned. Not sure how I'd act with a newer one and SSD. :)
 
Computational epidemiology - lots of coding, simulation and statistics in Python, C and R, plus manuscript preparation, figure editing in Inkscape, etc.

Mac Pro, Quad 3.2 Ghz model with 24 GB of RAM and a 5870 graphics card. Storage is a 256 GB SSD, a 2x 2TB drives and 1x 1TB drive.
 
For me mostly what I use my machine for is Lightroom 4 and some Photoshop to go with that. I also do a bit of video editing on the side for some extra money and use Final Cut X but in the process of moving to Premiere as I have found it to be a bit smoother and have much better multi monitor support.

As for the specs:

Mac Pro 5,1 - 2.8GHz Quad, 16GB Ram, 5770. Then Hard Drives: 4x WD VelociRaptors 160GB in Raid 0 for OS and Apps (Super Fast), 2TB for Movies, TV Shows and the Like, 1TB as a Time Machine Backup of the Raid, and then a External 1TB for Lightroom Library and then a spare 1TB put away with monthly backups for Lightroom Library. Both the 2TB and 1TB Time Machine are in the optical drive bay. Displays: 30" Cinema Display, BenQ 24" G2420HD
 
Last edited:
I use mine (main specs are in my sig) for video editing (FCP, Avid) and compositing (After Effects). Occasionally, I boot it into Windows to play games.
 
For a couple of you that asked about my video card/resolution/etc...

attachment.php


It IS a 23" HD ACD, not a 24". In Snow Leopard, it only ran at the 1920X1200 resolution as it should. I can't test Mountain Lion otherwise, I would. This is Lion and it seems to allow for a higher resolution.

Sorry to semi-hijack the thread OP.
 
Nothing exciting, just lots of VM's - mostly Windows OS, but need the capability to have a Mac OS VMs in there too.

Nox
 
Live visual art for bands and djs. It analyzes the sound input and generates mathematical art in realtime. Wrote my own software. (All day-to-day work is done on the MBP but I have to carry the big machine to shows for its monster GPU; the sw depends heavily on OpenCL)....
 
X-Plane 10 Scenery Development.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=18715

Things like that :)
 
I use my Mac Pro (2012 Quad) as a central data repository hub ... its got 12TB worth of drives in it at the moment. Insofar as what the data is, it is primarily photographs, some video, and the projects that go along with that - Photoshop, Lightroom, iWeb, iMovie, Albums, etc.

I've been still able to get away with using iPhoto as my data manager, although I'm not really sure for how much longer ... its library's now ~0.7TB in size (and, as we know, not condusive to incremental archiving).

All are personal interest based, not work, although I'm naiively optimistic that some of the portfolio that I'm building up might be able to be a financial suppliment in my retirement...although it is probably going to take retirement to get all of the stuff organized - - especially the 25+ years worth of stuff still on film that hasn't been digitized yet.


-hh
 
Email, web browsing, photo editing, light video editing, light gaming, document creation, music playback, Blu-ray/DVD viewing/ripping/burning, database, on... and on... and on...
 
5050 said:
I've seen your site before, nice work! How's the mograph scene in SF? Only know of Gunshop and Autofuss.
Click to expand...
Sweet, thanks! How'd you find it?

It's great lately, especially for being a smaller studio. Lots of tech companies here are finally realizing the importance of video.

Are you into mograph as well?
 
skippyfx said:
Sweet, thanks! How'd you find it?

It's great lately, especially for being a smaller studio. Lots of tech companies here are finally realizing the importance of video.

Are you into mograph as well?
Click to expand...

Great video work! I guess marketing thru video is effective in capturing the target market and a Mac Pro can usually handle large files.
 
Software development primarily dealing with power system data analysis and conversion. Although all our staff have Macs the power industry is nearly always Windows desktops and usually Linux/Unix back-end so we need to be running Windows/Linux VMs for testing and development. We develop primarily in Java so the Mac works fine there (and we also do iOS work so we'd need Macs for that anyway)

I could probably have got away with a lower spec/cheaper system when I started but what the hell, it's a company machine and these days it's damn handy to have enough memory that I can do data analysis and conversion of large data sets by just loading it all into memory. Also gives me an incentive to multi-thread our software where I can.

I do occasionally play some games: Civ 5 under OS X or boot in Windows to play Battlefield 3. Have been interested in looking at GPU-based simulation for some of our software which would be an excuse to get a better graphics card (currently got the 5870) but as I'm running 2x ACD I'd need dual Displayport so 680 is probably out and not sure 7950 is worth it.

Current spec is: 12 Core 2.93 Ghz; 64GB memory; 1TB PCIe Accelsior SSD, 2x1TB RAID0 HDD, 3TB Time Machine drive, 1TB Backup mirror of the SSD (I'm paranoid and want it bootable) and an old 256GB SSD in the spare optical bay drive that's got a Windows x64 bootcamp partition and another partition I don't really use right now (it was the boot before the PCIe SSD); Radeon 5870; 2x 27" ACD. Not saying I need all of that... but damn is it fast especially when I have umpteen things open and running at once!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back