HD For Indies

Super short version: slightly faster processors, new graphics cards, NO NEW HD OPTICAL DRIVES - so we wait for NAB apparently, as expected.

Apple rolled out new Mac Pro models today.

The deal, marching down the config options:

New Harpertown Processors, available in following configs:
-single quad core 2.8 GHz ($2299 base price)
-dual quad core 2.8 GHz ($2799 base price, so +$500)
-dual quad core 3.0 GHz ($3599 base price, so +$1300)
-dual quad core 3.2 GHz ($4399 base price, so +$2100)

Welcome to Intel based pricing. As usual, be smart about when to buy and NOT to buy the tippy top CPU - is it worth the money? Depends.

RAM - standard 2GB, can config from Apple up to 32GB...for an additional $9100. Ouch! Few users will actually see benefit from that. And NO, gobs of RAM will not make REDcode crunch any faster. I SWEAR.


RAID Card
-glad they have it, but still limited to 4 drives, and one needs to be a boot drive. They have cut the price form $1000 to $800, though - a good start guys. REQUIRED WHEN SELECTING SAS DRIVES.

Hard Drive Options
-you can get a 300GB, 15K rpm SAS drive - saw that and thought good, ultimate boot drive. But dammit - if you go one SAS drive, ya gotta go all SAS. And that 300GB SAS drive is $800. Ouch!
-you cn now get 1TB drives internally in addition to 500 and 750 GB drives. Drive costs have been dropped to more reasonable prices as well...but still higher than third party pricing.

Graphics have all new choices, it appears ALL cards will support two 30" displays. Also includes PCIe 2.0, which is 2x faster than the prior version, new on this box.
-default is ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT w/256MB VRAM, you can get up to 4 of them to drive up to 8 monitors up to 30" apiece
-NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512 MB is a $200 bump up
-NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 has 1.5GB VRAM for $2850 extra. Guess who needs that.

Displays
-no changes - 20, 23, & 30 are still $600, $900, and $1800 a pop (actual $$$ less $1)

Optical Drives
dammit, no changes. 1 or 2 16x dual layer SuperDrives, NO BLU-RAY OR HD DVD OPTIONS. Drat. Wait for NAB to see the next cards be turned over.

Wireless
-appears Bluetooth is built in, Airport extreme card is $50

Fibre Channel Card - dual or quad 4Gb cards for $600 or $1000

The Rest - appears all the same. Oh, wait - you get the new flatty keyboard, which I like, expect for the wretched Caps Lock key.

BOTTOM LINE

Speed bump. New, presumably faster GPUs (need to read up on those more). The box I'd want is just shy of $11K with monitors. Ouch.

As usual, I am available for consulting on system configurations, which inevitably has more to do with what you want to do with it rather than what the available options are. The process can be steered by price or appropriateness for a given task, or the more interesting blend of the two to optimize every dollar spent.

Apple - Mac Pro - Technology - Processor:
-45nm process
-2.8-3.2 GHz Harpertown quad core processors
-12MB L2 cache per processor, 6MB per pair of cores
-two 1600Mhz front side buses
-up to 25.6GB/sec processor bandwidth - GOOD
-800 MHz DDR2 buffered memory
-SSE4 SIMD tech
-256 bit wide memory architecture

Apple - Mac Pro - Technology - Graphics
-PCI Express 2.0
-ATI HD 2600 XT with 256 MB, two dual link DVI ports (supports two 30" displays)
-NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT has 512 MB VRAM
-NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 has 1.5GB VRAM



UDPATE - Apple also introduced new 8 core Xserves

Labels: Apple, Mac, Mac Pro