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Mac Pro Announced on the apple website. Dual Xeon Duos @ 3 GHz, not bad.

www.apple.com

$1100 for 4 GB of RAM? (Okay, okay, it's ECC RAM, therefore $$$, but still...)

Also, why the 7300 GT?

And, $100 for a Superdrive?! lol whatever

$400 for a 500GB hard drive?! Ridiculous.

A fully loaded tower - not including software or monitors - will run a bit under $13,000. Good lord.

Not the radical case redesign I was hoping for, but at least it's got two optical drives. That always struck me as a pain on the original - you've got this quad core, 64-bit machine with gigs of RAM and yet you're stuck with one internal optical drive?

Uraniun235 wrote:$1100 for 4 GB of RAM? (Okay, okay, it's ECC RAM, therefore $$$, but still...)

Also, why the 7300 GT?

And, $100 for a Superdrive?! lol whatever

$400 for a 500GB hard drive?! Ridiculous.

A fully loaded tower - not including software or monitors - will run a bit under $13,000. Good lord.

Superdrive is dual layer dual format 16x. Apple still marks it up a little of course but those drives ARE quite expensive.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... DT&cat=DVD

Also, the new Xeons uses a special type of RAM that is more expensive. And it's the ECC RAM. AND Apple is famous for overcharging RAM and hard drives. Buy the RAM elsewhere, it's user upgradeable.


If I were a buyer, I'd get the base system with quad processors and GPU, and the smallest hard drive and superdrives, but the least RAM and hard drive possible, then upgrade those myself for 1/2 the price.

Superdrive is dual layer dual format 16x. Apple still marks it up a little of course but those drives ARE quite expensive.

No,they'renot.
And Geeks wants way too much for that Sony drive anyway, as Newegg has it for $53.99.
And it's not even worth that, as the Sony drives are just rebranded Liteons.

Though in Apple's defense, other PC makers (I'm looking at you, Dell) often mark their DVD-+R drives up just as much.

Getting a quad-core Xeon for $2,599 is a fucking good deal no matter which way you slice it. The machine it plenty upgradable, so it's not like you can't just buy cheaper components yourself.

At least you can buy aftermarket RAM for it. We ran into a problem with some old Dell desktops when we went to upgrade them - Dell shit up their systems somehow such that even when we bought the right kind of RAM, the system still wouldn't boot with anything but Dell RAM.

Those DIMMs are still fucking expensive. They're each the size of a small PCI card, if the pictures are any indication.

In any case, Apple's offerings are competitive with other manufacturers'. And you get better hardware engineering to boot.

Durandal wrote:Those DIMMs are still fucking expensive. They're each the size of a small PCI card, if the pictures are any indication.

In any case, Apple's offerings are competitive with other manufacturers'. And you get better hardware engineering to boot.

They stuck the RAM on daughter cards. Due to how the FB-DIMM spec is made, they can do that.

Durandal wrote:Getting a quad-core Xeon for $2,599 is a fucking good deal no matter which way you slice it. The machine it plenty upgradable, so it's not like you can't just buy cheaper components yourself.

You can actually get a quad-core Xeon for $2,124 if you drop the hard drive to 160 GB and take the quad 2 GHz version. Then upgrade all you want.

Durandal wrote:Getting a quad-core Xeon for $2,599 is a fucking good deal no matter which way you slice it. The machine it plenty upgradable, so it's not like you can't just buy cheaper components yourself.

How good a deal is it considering Conroe and it's ilk that are about to be released?

Ofcourse they might not even play in the same kind of fields so it might be an irrelevant question. Xeons, weren't they for highend server duties?

EDIT: Or are these part of the new processors coming out? I realize I may be just be very confused due to archaic naming conventions.

His Divine Shadow wrote:

Durandal wrote:Getting a quad-core Xeon for $2,599 is a fucking good deal no matter which way you slice it. The machine it plenty upgradable, so it's not like you can't just buy cheaper components yourself.

How good a deal is it considering Conroe and it's ilk that are about to be released?

Ofcourse they might not even play in the same kind of fields so it might be an irrelevant question. Xeons, weren't they for highend server duties?

EDIT: Or are these part of the new processors coming out? I realize I may be just be very confused due to archaic naming conventions.

The new Xeons, aka Woodcrest, are built on the same architecture as Conroe, just faster (more cache, faster bus, etc). A 3 GHz Xeon Woodcrest outperforms a 3 GHz Core 2 Duo Conroe.

Also, Conroe does not work in dual processor configurations, so it is impossible to have two Core 2 Duo's. So no quads unless you go Xeon.

I wish they had gone with a new name. Xeon makes me think of the Pentium 4's architecture.

Praxis wrote:I wish they had gone with a new name. Xeon makes me think of the Pentium 4's architecture.

There were Pentium III Xeons as well. I think they just wanted to keep the name because marketing works differently in the server sectors, where you don't have to drum up big advertising campaigns to show "OMG TEH NEW CPU IS HERE!!"

Xeon actually dates back to the Pentium 2; I have a couple of boxed Pentium 2 Xeons (one of which had never been opened) in my closet.

Yes and thats what I was thinking of when I heard the word Xeon. Wasn't there something like this the Pentium Pro brand too? Wasn't it the Pentium model before Pentium II?

And speaking of new macs. Should I get?

-A 17" Macbook Pro?
-A 15" Macbook Pro + 23" display?
-A 13" Macbook + 23" display?


I am leaning towards the middle option myself, maybe go easy on the HD and RAM and add on myself later with cheaper non-apple hardware. It depends on how the future looks for Macbooks.

The Macbooks small size is not a worry since I'd get a 23" screen with the ability to be wallmounted, it might be considered a plus infact(mobility). But the graphics card is lacking compared to the MBP's and the 17" has the 800 firewire port but I think thats all the diff from the 15" version and thats not enough to turn me.

Pentium Pro was not just a brand, but a new design, which came after the original Pentium chip, starting at speeds of 150 MHz. The Pentium 2 and Pentium 3 were derivatives of the Pentium Pro design.