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Tenacious Dyl · Nov 12, 2006, 06:27 PM

I'm looking into getting (hopefully trading) for a Mac Pro and wanted to hear people's opinions. Obviously its fast, its no where near portable, etc. I was more looking to hear feedback from current owners, the perks, problems, etc. Thanks!

Cadaver · Nov 12, 2006, 08:52 PM

Perks: Fast, quiet, stable.
Problems: None so far.

k2director · Nov 12, 2006, 09:06 PM

I love mine. I have the 3GHz model, with ATI graphics card, 4 internal hard drives, and a bunch of ram. Love it, love it, love it. No problems with it so far. It handles everything I've thrown at it. I love having a 2 or 3 drive RAID built in, without needing an external case. Couldn't recommend the machine enough. It will further fly when Adobe releases UB versions of its apps...

Easily the best and most trouble-free desktop Mac I've had (and I had 3 out of 4 of the last G5 PowerMacs, including the Quad).

Tenacious Dyl · Nov 12, 2006, 09:54 PM

Sounds excellent!

Speaking of that, how is the amount of noise it makes, and how is the heat production? My old Dual 2.5 GHz G5 pretty much heated my small studio.

imitchellg5 · Nov 12, 2006, 09:55 PM

My friend has one. Pros: Incredibly fast, incredibly quiet ( for four cores at least), tons of expansion. Cons: Expensive RAM, 4 cores don't help with some apps.

Rolling Musubi · Nov 13, 2006, 01:35 AM

Originally Posted by Tenacious Dyl

Speaking of that, how is the amount of noise it makes, and how is the heat production? My old Dual 2.5 GHz G5 pretty much heated my small studio.

Coming from a 2002 Quicksilver Dual 1.2 G4 maxed out with 4 drives, the Mac Pro is a much quieter machine (I currently have 3 drives in the MP but plan to fill the remaining one as well as the open optical bay with drives). The front fans emit a very slight amount of noise which I can barely hear from an arms length away (if you have more sensitive hearing and/or are in a very quiet room, you'll probably hear them a bit more). I still have the stock 7300GT; I've heard the blower on the X1900XT and it will add a bit more noise unless swapped out with an Accelero X2. To put the difference (for me) into perspective, I had to do a massive drive swapping operating on my Graphite G4 which runs as a server because the older drives in it were rather loud and had been masked by the fan noise made by the Quicksilver.

As for the heat, my QS2002 G4 actually expelled much more since the fans in that El Capitan case could never exhaust all that trapped heat fast enough. With the Mac Pro, the exhaust temp even during an x.264 encode for an hour+ doesn't increase much nor does the warmth on the bottom or left hand side of the case. The CPU core temperatures increase up to 161F/72C (the heatsink sensors read around 121F/50C) during those sort of operations but quickly drop down to between 113-116F/45-47C (heatsink reads around 104F/40C) once the job ends. The fan speeds don't spped up during these kind of intensive operations (the two front fans stay at 500RPM while the exhaust stays at 600RPM; it would be nice to increase them by 100RPM to provide more cooling though). For the amount of power this machine has, it is deceptively quiet and cool running.

Overall, I've been very pleased with the Mac Pro (my ears probably more so). Here's the sensor readout from regular low usage. If I turn on the room AC (where the ambient room temperature is in the 70's), the CPU cores end up around 96-98F/35-37C.

all2ofme · Nov 13, 2006, 05:22 AM

Mine's incredible. Sometimes I bring up Activity Monitor to see how much headroom it has left, and it's generally just ticking over

It'd be completely barmy of me to look longingly at whatever they introduce to replace it - I'm barely scratching the surface of what I have.

Aperture's amazing with it. I'm yet to chuck a good Photoshop session at it, but even under Rosetta I'm expecting it to work well. I've got plenty of RAM (5GB) and fast disks and coming from an old PBG4 it'll seem fast...

Only slight downside is that it's slightly noiser than I'd like, but I'm sure I'll be able to tame that when I have half an hour spare to poke things to work out where the noise is coming from. I'm expecting it to be the X1900XT (Accelero X2 cooler on the way) and the extra drives (3 total).

In short - it's the best computer I've ever owned and would buy exactly the same thing again.

Xyrrus · Nov 13, 2006, 02:10 PM

Originally Posted by all2ofme

Mine's incredible. Sometimes I bring up Activity Monitor to see how much headroom it has left, and it's generally just ticking over

It'd be completely barmy of me to look longingly at whatever they introduce to replace it - I'm barely scratching the surface of what I have.

Aperture's amazing with it. I'm yet to chuck a good Photoshop session at it, but even under Rosetta I'm expecting it to work well. I've got plenty of RAM (5GB) and fast disks and coming from an old PBG4 it'll seem fast...

Only slight downside is that it's slightly noiser than I'd like, but I'm sure I'll be able to tame that when I have half an hour spare to poke things to work out where the noise is coming from. I'm expecting it to be the X1900XT (Accelero X2 cooler on the way) and the extra drives (3 total).

In short - it's the best computer I've ever owned and would buy exactly the same thing again.

Since the original poster asked about noise, I thought I'd chime in here, too. The machine out of the box was really quite quiet; quieter than my Powerbook Ti with the fans spinning. After adding the X1900 and 4 additional drives, the machine is no longer exactly what I'd call quiet. I certainly don't notice the noise at idle, but I've been playing Neverwinter Nights 2 using Boot Camp, which basically keeps the X1900's fans running at full speed. Its not a quiet card when its being stressed. I'm looking into the X2 cooler now, as well.

-Xy

mduell · Nov 13, 2006, 06:04 PM

Originally Posted by Rolling Musubi

The fan speeds don't spped up during these kind of intensive operations (the two front fans stay at 500RPM while the exhaust stays at 600RPM; it would be nice to increase them by 100RPM to provide more cooling though).

Why? The system doesn't need it and it would only create more noise.

Daniel Bayer · Nov 14, 2006, 03:41 AM

Mine is awesome, except now I want to go to 8 GB of ram and can't seem to sell all these darn 512 sticks ( 4GB ).

I have *N*E*V*E*R* had a problem selling ram during an upgrade, bummer.

wei · Nov 14, 2006, 04:20 AM

I love mine too. 2.66 with 2GB of RAM. Just done some video convertion to multiple format at the same time lastnight. No lacking at all.
- Parallels with Winxp converting RMVB to AVI
- iSquint converting AVI to MP4 (nuts quality)
- VisualHub converting AVI to DVD
- I'm running frontrow watching movie

And here's something i did to tease my pc friend:
Expose 100++ items http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y23/wei803/expos.jpg
Expose with 50++ apps http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y23/wei803/expos2.jpg

Running Adobe CS2 with rosetta still beat the hell out of my office's dual 2.0 G5!

The down part? No CS3 yet. Not much apps to utilise quad core (for me). Too many expansion to go, I need more money.

Daniel Bayer · Nov 14, 2006, 04:37 AM

Originally Posted by wei

And here's something i did to tease my pc friend:
Expose 100++ items http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y23/wei803/expos.jpg
Expose with 50++ apps http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y23/wei803/expos2.jpg

I did that with 70 140 MB scans of panoramic film images when in a meeting with an art director.

That 1900XT video card is awesome! But then, so is the dual 250GB raid stripe photoshop scratch disk and 10,000 RPM Raptor boot drive, dual superdrives, etc....

mac128k-1984 · Nov 14, 2006, 07:43 AM

I'm very happy with mine. The one knock I have on it, and its a knock on the intel macs not the mac pro is the memory requirements. Because a lot of software is not UB and needs rosetta the memory requirements are higher. I was able to use Aperture and photoshop (running together) with 2 gig of ram. Now the 2 gig is a tad meager. 4 would be much better but money is an issue at least with me.

All in all I have no regrets and I'm pleased to have taken the plunge. I bought the MacPro for the future and I believe I am well positioned for the next OS coming from Apple and should be able to run Vista with no poblems either.

webmonkie · Nov 14, 2006, 08:02 AM

I'm happy with my Dual G5 2.5GHz. But I'm looking forward on getting a Quad Mac Pro Desktop. One thing is holding me back is the fact that Photoshop is not universal just yet.

mac128k-1984 · Nov 14, 2006, 08:05 AM

Originally Posted by webmonkie

I'm happy with my Dual G5 2.5GHz. But I'm looking forward on getting a Quad Mac Pro Desktop. One thing is holding me back is the fact that Photoshop is not universal just yet.

I hear ya, for me it was the fact that I was running photoshop (and aperture) on a mini. A little too painful and the MacPro had to be better (luckilly it was

)

bleee · Nov 14, 2006, 08:55 AM

Great machines I think we will see more speed boosts with the next revision of OS X also as more apps get translated to universal binary.

Tenacious Dyl · Nov 14, 2006, 10:58 AM

Great replies, thank you! It looks like I will be getting a G5 for mlw.. I cant't quite pull together a MacPro, but certainly at the next rev, or 2 revo in the future... I'll be all over it. I wonder what will be in the next revs?

Could be blue ray, dual quad core, ... hrm.

UnixMac · Nov 14, 2006, 11:25 AM

Best computer experience I've ever had.. and I've had a lot! TI99A thru MacPro, so far 21 computers owned..

ionic · Nov 14, 2006, 01:32 PM

So far my Mac Pro has been good, but mine's not as quiet as everyone led me to believe. I still have intermittent vibration from the hard drive sleds against the access door despite reseating the hard drives and the door multiple times. The fans are also noiser than my Dell OptiPlex was. I don't know anyone else nearby that has forked out the big bucks to buy a Mac Pro yet, so I don't have anybody else's to compare it with.

Mac OS with any PowerPC applications running on this machine really feels like a dog. Windows under Boot Camp (and frankly, it seems under Parallels) is much more responsive than Mac OS. I have absolutely no complaints whatsoever about the Mac Pro's performance in Windows, including CS2.

Daniel Bayer · Nov 14, 2006, 02:57 PM

Originally Posted by mac128k-1984

I'm very happy with mine. The one knock I have on it, and its a knock on the intel macs not the mac pro is the memory requirements. Because a lot of software is not UB and needs rosetta the memory requirements are higher. I was able to use Aperture and photoshop (running together) with 2 gig of ram. Now the 2 gig is a tad meager. 4 would be much better but money is an issue at least with me.

All in all I have no regrets and I'm pleased to have taken the plunge. I bought the MacPro for the future and I believe I am well positioned for the next OS coming from Apple and should be able to run Vista with no poblems either.

You can get a 1GB pair of Apple certified right here for $200:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...2403&rd=1&rd=1

Rolling Musubi · Nov 14, 2006, 08:07 PM

Originally Posted by mduell

Why? The system doesn't need it and it would only create more noise.

I live in a location where it isn't uncommon for the ambient temperatures to get into the 90's and that means much more heat. On my Dual G4, I went through 3 failed Apple processor boards because Apple's design back then was probably based on systems running in a 70F environment. The first two which were replaced under AppleCare came back with the same diagnosis, overheating which isn't surprising considering the amount of heat that system is unable to adequately exhaust even with just one hard drive installed (imagine with 2-4).

My system isn't fully loaded yet so the temperatures I currently see will only go up. As it stands, a drive in bay1 based on its SMART temperature sensor reading remains much warmer because the expansion slot fan doesn't provide much airflow to the 1st (and 4th if occupied) bay. I've lost more than enough drives in the past solely due to heat as a result of insufficient airflow (and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that heat is one of the worse enemies for electronic components and that reducing it will increase the longetivity of said components).

Cranking up the fans by just a few hundred RPM's also didn't increase the noise. My PS fan during the day averages around 840RPM and this is still quiet (I even popped the side off just to make sure that it wasn't because I was deaf or something

). I've tried using a modified version of smcfancontrol (the command line tool) just to test (don't want to use it further than that since there was no way to individually control each fan). It's only when the fans ramp up to 1000+RPM's that it is loud. Having the fans running at 700RPM dropped temperatures up to 20F in the short time I tried it. Apple's built-in SMC parameters are geared towards running the system as quiet as possible even under full load conditions which is why the fans never crank up and it seems they will only spin up when the temperatures are close to the upper specified limits. IMO, Apple should make it possible to offer options to allow the user to adjust this behavior.