anandtech.com — Here we're going to be looking at the Mac Pro as a Mac (mostly) and compare the performance of two speed grades (2.0GHz and 2.66GHz) to the outgoing PowerMac G5. We'll also take the thing apart and give you a nice tour in pictures of the new chassis.
Aug 16, 2006 View in Crawl 4
geminitojanusAug 16, 2006
They figure the geek in us who build our own machines have eight dozen cases with power supplies and half-alive dvd-rw drives that we bought half a decade ago laying in them....and for a lot of us, that's probably true.
streakAug 17, 2006
I guess I'll have to be the first to say it (mod me down if you must): those FB-DIMMs suck! I hate latency.
Closed AccountAug 17, 2006
apple is teh suck, jesus and windows ftw
streakAug 17, 2006
It is my impression AMD is in better shape than Intel for scaling up cores, at least near term. Intel must resort to FB-DIMMs to reach comparable amounts of RAM storage. AMD manages with regular DDR2 memory to avoid the wait states of FB. Yes, the AMD chips have more pins, but this hasn't shown itself to be a real problem so far. (And I believe AMD is already well along on developing HyperTransport III).
lunarworksAug 17, 2006
I really want a Mac. But:I don't want a Mac mini, because you can't (internally) expand it.I don't want an iMac, for the same reason as the Mac mini, plus I'm not fond of all-in-ones.I don't want a Mac Pro, because it's way too much power (and money) for my needs.Until Apple offers a mid-range tower, I'm not biting. I imagine there's a whole bunch of people who agree. A real un-tapped market.
elevenAug 17, 2006
I don't know enough about how this type of RAM works - but could they not upgrade the interlinks to the individual chips in the future and still retail backwards compatibility? If the controller is on the chip - as it is - it should mean that anything after that point could potentially change without breaking compatibility with existing HW. Like I said, I could be out to lunch, but this type of memory seems like a forward looking option. It's current incarnation is not great, as the reviewer says, but it could improve by a long shot as well.
danielwsmitheeAug 17, 2006
Since you don't read the comments posted above I will repeat here:The qaudro NVS 285 is a $150 dollar card. It is the best comparison available to the $100 7300 GT. Take $50 off the price of the Dell if you like to make it more fair, even with the $150 you could get by selling the $17 display the Apple still has a much better price point.
streakAug 17, 2006
He should be able to afford a Quad G5 system to compare against the Mac Pro then.Love them heat sinks on the FB-DIMMs. Disco Inferno, baby!
mobilehavocAug 18, 2006
FTA:"The memory performance of FBD on the Intel 5000X chipset is absolutely horrid and there's nothing you can do about it unless you switch entirely to an all serial interface or go back to using regular DDR2 memory."Ouch.