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Apple Ships 8-Core MacPro
ivan1024 writes "The Apple website is announcing the availability of an 8-core Mac Pro. The machine will ship with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5300 processors. Older models with the Dual-Core chips remain available. Base model with two 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors start at $3997, (albeit with unacceptably minimal RAM or HD space; fully spec'd with dual 30" monitors and tons o' RAM/HD still over $10K... bummer)"
The front end is usually Avid or Apple software - and the Apple software only runs on OS X, and the Avid software can run on OS X. Linux boxes are often used for rendering farms. IRIX? Didn't SGI just discontinue IRIX?
No. Installing memory in a Mac Mini does not void the warranty.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Here's another tip.
Look at Apple's "Select Developer Membership." At the base configuration, the difference between (ADC Select Membership + Mac Pro w/ discount) and (Mac Pro w/o discount) is $1... in favor of the membership. Bumping up the Mac Pro to the 8-core version yields $300 savings (ie: $800 savings - $500 membership). Plus you get everything that comes with the membership, including the Leopard Early Start Kit and two free tech support incidents.
If you're a student, the membership price drops from $500 to $100, though you're only allowed to use the hardware discount once ever, whereas the Select Membership lets you buy hardware with the discount once per year (at a price of $500/year).
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
Requiring admin privs for their software to run. Dmitri Sklyarov. Making Acrobat Reader bloated and slow.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
4d? Are you sending your rendered images into the past, or the future?
CG animation uses a timeline as well as three dimensional coordinates, so 4d is technically correct.
Blank until
Premiere? Well first off, it is available for the Mac, secondly Adobe stopped making it for the Mac for a while because Premeire has always been a low-end program for prosumers and multimedia professionals.
Only low end shops use Final Cut? So do you consider:
The BBC
CNN
David Fincher
The Washington Post
Pixar
Weta
ILM small shops? Cold Mountain and Lost in Translation were cut solely on Final Cut Pro, and for compositing tools don't forget Shake is what Weta used to make the Lord of the Rings movies and King Kong.
Tea and kung-fu. Life is good. Rising Phoenix
You have 14 days to exchange the machine for the newer one at an Apple Store and pay just a restocking fee. Better get on it!
Those who laugh at you for you having a Mac.. are the people who constantly call you to fix their PC.
Sorry, bud... But if this is a design house, I hope they have someone that can spend their time sourcing parts. If it is a freelancer spec'ing out their own machine, they are doing themselves a disservice by not spending an hour looking around for alternatives. Just to point out how bad the price gouging is...
Apple 16GB (8x2GB) FB-DIMM 667 $4499
Newegg 16GB (8x2GB) Kingston (KVR667D2D8F5/1G) FB-DIMM 667 $2392
Apple 750GB SATA 3GB/s $$499
ZipZoomFly ST3750640NS 750GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s $299
Apple Warranty 1 Year
Seagate HD Warranty 5 Years
Kingston Memory Lifetime Warranty
So at the least buy a bare bones Mac Pro and add your own parts, you will save a ton.
t seems you are under the mistaken impression that you can't drop any old modern nVidia PCI-E video card in a Mac.
Considering I find half a kazillion posts about said video cards not working under OS X, and the few that do need to use some beta driver from here and any new graphics cards will be a hit-or-miss thing too because the PC cards lack EFI support, yes I'm under that "mistaken impression". If you got any sources to back up your claims, I'd love to see them.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
An 8-core 2.67 GHz model from Dell runs $4907 with no monitor. For roughly the same price, you can get a Mac Pro with 8-cores at 3.0 GHz, 4 GB of FB-DIMM RAM (4x as much as on the Dell), 500 GB SATA disk (2x as much as on the Dell), and a pair of 7300GT graphics cards.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's still gouging, but not as bad as you think. In order to keep the Mac Pro from sounding like a Jumbo Jet, Apple made its own standard for heat sinks on DDR2 667 RAM. If you get DDR2 667 with normal heat sinks, it won't be able to lose heat fast enough under normal conditions, and will have errors. This isn't FUD, I'd been planning to get a Mac Pro for weeks (just ordered one, too; dual core 3 Ghz) and studied up on the RAM. Any RAM not using the better heat sinks has been tending to cause problems in Mac Pros. If you google it, you will find plenty of accounts of RAM not up to the standard Apple set failing in Mac Pros. However, you can (as I am doing) get 3rd party RAM with adequate heat sinks for reasonably decent prices. Just look around for "Mac Pro RAM" and you'll eventually find stuff that's been tried and tested, but isn't expensive. I found a place I can get 4 GB for less than $500, so I'm happy.
Getting the right RAM 3rd party is a smarter buy than getting it from Apple, but make sure you get the right RAM!
Again, from what I've seen, _be very careful_ getting RAM for the Mac Pro. Make sure it's been thoroughly tested first and had no problems before getting any given brand, and without the proper heat sinks, it seems like you're going to get slowdowns of the RAM and dramatic increases in the use of fans in the Mac Pro. (From what I've seen, though, it's more likely to have errors than just do that, unfortunately.)
Then again, you could probably get away with standard heat sinks if you know how to tweak the fans to run fast enough to keep them from going wonky.
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