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Why Pro?
- Thread starter nitro912gr
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MacPros have amazing staying power as a home PC. Yes, the are overkill if you upgrade every few months, but if you can be mature about things - you may learn to appreciate the difference between need and want. Pay for quality up front.
My machines is a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 GHz. I've had it for over five years with no real need to upgrade to a new PC. I found the 1GB of memory to be a little bit of a limitation, so I upgraded to 2, then 6GB. I can put up to 32GB in this box.
I found the single 250 GB drive to be a little lacking, so I added four more drives over the years (using my spare optical bay for a hard drive with a 5.25->3.5" adapter.
I found the nVidia 7600 to be a little lacking, so I have a very recent ATI Radeon HD 5770 (1GB) card from Apple in the machine. This was a long time coming because support for the 1,1 Mac Pro with Apple released cards was, well, pitiful.
I'm installing Lion now, and I'll be adding the Caldigit USB3/SATA6 card to improve the only area that's really lacking on this PC - drive performance - that's an easy update.
Oh, and if I feel like my CPUs are letting me down, I can more than double the current performance with dual 3GHz quad cores as an upgrade.
My machines is a Mac Pro 1,1 2x Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 GHz. I've had it for over five years with no real need to upgrade to a new PC. I found the 1GB of memory to be a little bit of a limitation, so I upgraded to 2, then 6GB. I can put up to 32GB in this box.
I found the single 250 GB drive to be a little lacking, so I added four more drives over the years (using my spare optical bay for a hard drive with a 5.25->3.5" adapter.
I found the nVidia 7600 to be a little lacking, so I have a very recent ATI Radeon HD 5770 (1GB) card from Apple in the machine. This was a long time coming because support for the 1,1 Mac Pro with Apple released cards was, well, pitiful.
I'm installing Lion now, and I'll be adding the Caldigit USB3/SATA6 card to improve the only area that's really lacking on this PC - drive performance - that's an easy update.
Oh, and if I feel like my CPUs are letting me down, I can more than double the current performance with dual 3GHz quad cores as an upgrade.
Are you talking about the Mac or PC card? I've had a 4870 in my MacPro for two years now and it's been stable and I never hear the fan.
Mac and PC. It is the cooler design. That fan at idle creates quite a bit of ambient noise. At post the thing howls like a banshee. I only notice the difference at idle when I am using a 5770, GT120, or 5870. They are all much quieter. Same noise is evident on the 4890 as well.
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The only problem with our machines (1,1/2,1/3,1) is the expensive RAM. It makes me sick that 4,1/5,1 owners get super-cheap RAM and we pay through the nose. Not necessarily Apple's fault there, either. The 5000X/5400 chipsets all required fully-buffered memory.
I'm really itching for 32GB these days on my own machine, but that would mean pulling out my eight 2GB modules and spending $900+ for a 32GB kit. And then I'd have to sell the old modules on eBay to recoup the cost a bit. Meanwhile, the newer dual CPU machines get the same amount of RAM for around $250. Ouch.
But does it worth the final cost to keep upgrading an old system like that when there is a huge gap in each CPU generation?
Can you tell me your initial spending when you bough your mac pro and how many money you ended up spending after the upgrades?
Also I'm a little confused about the CPU upgrade, I never heard of CPU upgrade in any apple pc. Are you talking about unofficial ways of upgrading?
If yes isn't this neutralize the stability factor since you do things that are not supported and as of that can result in instability?
Cost
I didn't make the post you refer to, but I think what the poster meant is that the Mac Pro tends to have a much longer life because of the upgrade options.
CPU upgrades aren't meant to be user installed, but the reality is that they can be done and installed relatively easily by anyone with a little tech savvy.
I recently added a Blu Ray writer to my 8 Core 2.26 Mac Pro for £64.
Since 2009 (when I purchased the Mac Pro), I've also added 24GB RAM, 8TB HD's (4 x 2TB), 4 port PCie USB2, 4 PCIe FW, and a second 24" display.
The Ram cost me £220, The display £200, the PCIe cards £80 and the 8TB HD's £300.
I originally purchased my Mac Pro for £1800 plus £700 for an Apple 24" display, so it has really cost me £2500 plus upgrades a total of £3364.00.
The upshot is, here I am in 2012 (3 years later) with a computer still as capable as most on the market, is very quiet, stylish, neat & extremely reliable.
Bear in mind that at the time I purchased my 8 core Mac Pro, the top of the range iMac was a 24" Core2 Duo 3.02Ghz, which would hold only 8GB RAM.
Even the current 27" quad core i7 iMac cost £1809. You cannot fit extra drives internally, so you'd need to purchase 4 external USB2 drives (circa £85 each - £350), external Blu Ray writer £130, 16GB Ram from Crucial would cost £181 (£480 from Apple).
Add that all together and it comes to £2370. Add a 2nd display for £200 and you're less than £800 cheaper than my Mac Pro - and that's despite purchasing it 3 years later.
l don't have the noise and mess of external HD's and Blu Ray writers, and I have the extra USB and Firewire ports, plus the flexibility to change graphics cards and add USB3, esata etc etc - something you simply cannot do on an iMac.
All told I'm VERY happy with my Mac Pro and think most people who use them are too.
its done what I wanted it to do from day one and has got better with age because of the upgrades you can add - they're great!
I didn't make the post you refer to, but I think what the poster meant is that the Mac Pro tends to have a much longer life because of the upgrade options.
CPU upgrades aren't meant to be user installed, but the reality is that they can be done and installed relatively easily by anyone with a little tech savvy.
I recently added a Blu Ray writer to my 8 Core 2.26 Mac Pro for £64.
Since 2009 (when I purchased the Mac Pro), I've also added 24GB RAM, 8TB HD's (4 x 2TB), 4 port PCie USB2, 4 PCIe FW, and a second 24" display.
The Ram cost me £220, The display £200, the PCIe cards £80 and the 8TB HD's £300.
I originally purchased my Mac Pro for £1800 plus £700 for an Apple 24" display, so it has really cost me £2500 plus upgrades a total of £3364.00.
The upshot is, here I am in 2012 (3 years later) with a computer still as capable as most on the market, is very quiet, stylish, neat & extremely reliable.
Bear in mind that at the time I purchased my 8 core Mac Pro, the top of the range iMac was a 24" Core2 Duo 3.02Ghz, which would hold only 8GB RAM.
Even the current 27" quad core i7 iMac cost £1809. You cannot fit extra drives internally, so you'd need to purchase 4 external USB2 drives (circa £85 each - £350), external Blu Ray writer £130, 16GB Ram from Crucial would cost £181 (£480 from Apple).
Add that all together and it comes to £2370. Add a 2nd display for £200 and you're less than £800 cheaper than my Mac Pro - and that's despite purchasing it 3 years later.
l don't have the noise and mess of external HD's and Blu Ray writers, and I have the extra USB and Firewire ports, plus the flexibility to change graphics cards and add USB3, esata etc etc - something you simply cannot do on an iMac.
All told I'm VERY happy with my Mac Pro and think most people who use them are too.
its done what I wanted it to do from day one and has got better with age because of the upgrades you can add - they're great!
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I see.
You know I'm in a big dilemma here because I try to see the benefits of the workstation as a whole, because the only reason for me to get a mac pro and leave my custom windows desktop is OSX.
I do have the expandability of the tower case, I can upgrade it literally for ever (even if after a period of 4-5 years the only think that is the same as at the start is the case and the DVD-R) and I can add everything I love on it, even switching completely in workstation grade components.
So now that I want to move to OSX completely (I do own a macbook already) on the one hand is the expandability of a mac pro, but on the other is the much bigger cost for what I want to do.
I personally doesn't care for the extra support for the mac pro (and the workstations in general) because I do know a thing or two about hardware and software and I can encounter any possible problem in a day or 2, while in the meantime I do my job in my laptop.
What I try to do here is to judge if the cost to move at the mac platform worth it for me, or maybe I should stay on my windows desktop till the time I can afford a strong transition with a mid range mac pro.
So far I have decided that I don't need a windows workstation, but on the mac side thinks are different, since there is not other option than the workstation class mac pro.
You know I'm in a big dilemma here because I try to see the benefits of the workstation as a whole, because the only reason for me to get a mac pro and leave my custom windows desktop is OSX.
I do have the expandability of the tower case, I can upgrade it literally for ever (even if after a period of 4-5 years the only think that is the same as at the start is the case and the DVD-R) and I can add everything I love on it, even switching completely in workstation grade components.
So now that I want to move to OSX completely (I do own a macbook already) on the one hand is the expandability of a mac pro, but on the other is the much bigger cost for what I want to do.
I personally doesn't care for the extra support for the mac pro (and the workstations in general) because I do know a thing or two about hardware and software and I can encounter any possible problem in a day or 2, while in the meantime I do my job in my laptop.
What I try to do here is to judge if the cost to move at the mac platform worth it for me, or maybe I should stay on my windows desktop till the time I can afford a strong transition with a mid range mac pro.
So far I have decided that I don't need a windows workstation, but on the mac side thinks are different, since there is not other option than the workstation class mac pro.
I would simply say that the life-cycle of the MacPro is more than double that of an iMac.
Consider - right now you can drop up to 128Gbs of ram in a current MacPro. It is going to be a while (if ever) for that to show up in a iMac.
If a component dies in the iMac - the whole machine goes back to Apple - with a Mac Pro, just replace the bad component.
If you want a Mac Pro for OS X, you could buy a refurbished 2010 for $2119 from the Apple Store online, add the 6-core chip for $585, add a bunch of RAM really cheap from OWC, and you'll be cooking with gas for less than $3000.
While I love my Mac Pro and OS X, I personally don't think it's that big a deal, and would probably build a PC with dual-boot Windows7 and Windows8 if I were building a new system today. I miss how inexpensive and customizable the PC side is, and the amount of problems on either side (PC vs Mac) have been the same for me... pretty much zero.
I haven't tried Lion yet, and most likely will skip it and just try Mountain Lion when it's stable. I'd like to have my two systems dual-booting Win7/8 and 10.6/10.8 sometime this year.
Nitro, I bought a used 2009 4-core (6GB/320GB I think) for $1500 off of Craigslist.
It is so much faster than my 2010 MBP / i7 that it is just amazing. I needed it for the slots (big fat GPU for parallel computing) -- but I had *no* idea that it would be that much faster. Very pleasant surprise.
So, used is an option; it sure worked for me!...
(I still want a new one when they come out!, and I will probably be able to justify spending some inheritance money to get one -- but my workload is very computationally intensive. You may not need one at all. But, used is a cheaper way to get in the door. And, like someone below implied, just opening up the case and looking inside will give you a . . . a feeling. A good one!)
It is so much faster than my 2010 MBP / i7 that it is just amazing. I needed it for the slots (big fat GPU for parallel computing) -- but I had *no* idea that it would be that much faster. Very pleasant surprise.
So, used is an option; it sure worked for me!...
(I still want a new one when they come out!, and I will probably be able to justify spending some inheritance money to get one -- but my workload is very computationally intensive. You may not need one at all. But, used is a cheaper way to get in the door. And, like someone below implied, just opening up the case and looking inside will give you a . . . a feeling. A good one!)
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Original Mac-Pro dual xeon was $2500.
Adding 5GB RAM was about $300
Adding the new video card was $350
I'm not going to count the cost of drive upgrades, because I need the space and redundancy; and I'd have to do the same to an iMac.
As far as the CPU upgrade, those are chips that shipped in a Mac with the same exact motherboard - so no stability issue exists.
I have 0 problems doing anything I'd like with the CPU performance on this machine, including running virtual machines. Remember also that dual CPUs have advantages over multi-core CPUs as the CPUs do not share caches. In the case of a Mac Pro, you have dual multi-core CPUs in a server class package. It really is a reliable machine.
I like expensive reliable machines. I've got a DEC Alpha 500MHz 64-bit RISC system running Windows NT 4.0 64-bit from 1998 as well. It still hums along running lightwave through it's dual-PCI Intergraph video card. Yep, that was an expensive computer, but it continues to work 14 years later.
Adding 5GB RAM was about $300
Adding the new video card was $350
I'm not going to count the cost of drive upgrades, because I need the space and redundancy; and I'd have to do the same to an iMac.
As far as the CPU upgrade, those are chips that shipped in a Mac with the same exact motherboard - so no stability issue exists.
I have 0 problems doing anything I'd like with the CPU performance on this machine, including running virtual machines. Remember also that dual CPUs have advantages over multi-core CPUs as the CPUs do not share caches. In the case of a Mac Pro, you have dual multi-core CPUs in a server class package. It really is a reliable machine.
I like expensive reliable machines. I've got a DEC Alpha 500MHz 64-bit RISC system running Windows NT 4.0 64-bit from 1998 as well. It still hums along running lightwave through it's dual-PCI Intergraph video card. Yep, that was an expensive computer, but it continues to work 14 years later.
The difference between consumer grade and workstation has never really been about CPU performance (and i'm not just including apple in that - i'm talking about the industry in general).
Although workstation CPU/GPU performance is often better, the more important things are:
- expandability - both large RAM capacity and specialist IO cards
- ECC memory - in many industries, bit-errors in data are just unacceptable
- i/o throughput - stuff like fibre channel, RAID, PCIe expansion
Faster cpu/gpu performance is only part of the reason the Pro exists.
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OP - as someone else mentioned - if you can't see a glaring need for you to purchase a Mac Pro, you probably don't need one. It is all about the slots and internal expansion capacity. if you aren't likely to need to expand in that manner, an iMac will likely be cheaper and do the job for you just as well.
Although workstation CPU/GPU performance is often better, the more important things are:
- expandability - both large RAM capacity and specialist IO cards
- ECC memory - in many industries, bit-errors in data are just unacceptable
- i/o throughput - stuff like fibre channel, RAID, PCIe expansion
Faster cpu/gpu performance is only part of the reason the Pro exists.
edit:
OP - as someone else mentioned - if you can't see a glaring need for you to purchase a Mac Pro, you probably don't need one. It is all about the slots and internal expansion capacity. if you aren't likely to need to expand in that manner, an iMac will likely be cheaper and do the job for you just as well.
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Very true. as for the last part, I believe a Mac Pro with it's expansion options and upgradeability, in the long run is cheaper than buying 2 or 3 iMacs which is what I think I would of had had to buy to keep up. The Mac Pro only required minor upgrades to keep performance at a level that matched the current times. I do video and gaming on my setup, and the difference would've been 2 iMacs by now, and another this year. I expect this machine to last at least 1 more year, possibly 2.