[sjohnson4343]

Hello Mac heads,

I'm sure this has been asked many times, but I'm going to bring it up again just because I'm a Mac newbie and so far I'm liking what I see.

I just bought a MacPro workstation. Hasn't arrived yet. I bought the dual core 2.66 option. Am I correct in my understanding that if in a few days/months/years time if I want to upgrade to the xeon quad-core processors, I can then buy 2 quad core xeon's and swap them in?

From looking at the intel webpage, it doesn't look like they have a different socket footprint, so I'm thinking this should be easily accomplished, but I just wanted to check to be sure. I'm hoping so, since this will greatly increase the lifetime of this system.

I'm not sure why anyone would even buy an intel core2duo extreme based system, or even a quad core c2d system seeing as how the Mac based xeon's can be upgraded and support dual socket. The mac is cheaper than a comperable dell with a quad core c2duo chip. It would make sense to me to run windows on the Mac if you had to have Windows since it seems to be a more scalable system for cheaper. But the xeon's are older chips, so I'm sure the c2d chips have some advantage, but even still.. Go Mac.

[Lateralus]

Correct.

You'll not be able to use Core 2 processors because they are LGA 775. The Xeon is LGA 771.

But so long as Intel continues to manufacture Xeons based on the current architecture that use the current socket interface, you'll be able to easily upgrade.

[mduell]

Yes, you can drop any of the currently available 5100/5300 (and maybe 5000, but you don't want those) series Xeons into the Mac Pro. The upcoming (end of the year) 5400 Xeons may work, but it hasn't been confirmed yet.

The Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad/Core 2 Extreme chips are very similar to the Xeons; the only significant difference is that the latter supports two sockets per system, while the former only supports one. But they're the same generation, same microarchitecture, same clockrates, same FSB, same cache, same power consumption, yada yada.