I went with Dual Quad 2.8GHzs in my Mac Pro. The premium to pay for the 3.2 ones was too high and I figured there wouldn't be that much of a performance difference anyway.
As far as reliability goes, I don't think you will have a problem. I read a ZDNet article on Mac Pro over clocking, and if I remember right they overclocked a paid of quad 2.8s to 3.4 with excellent stability.
My advice would be if you are going for a single quad, by the best you can afford, if you are going with duals then drop down a couple of speed steps.
My dual quad 2.8 is great for speed. I don't find myself waiting for anything more than what is reasonable. For all my Lightroom and Photoshop work nearly everything is instantaneous. I am on LR 2.x and PS CS4. My dual quad 2.8 has 10GB Ram, a 10,000 Raptor drive for OS and Apps, Two 1TB internal drives for data and backup and a 320GB internal for scratch (Though this drive never gets hit with 10GB Ram).
The other day I double clicked on a folder on my desktop to open it up but what I did not realize is that somehow every icon on my desktop at the time was selected. What this did was open/execute everything on my desktop, everything. This was folders, word documents, etc. In all about 50 various folders and documents. At the time I was copying files from my DVD drive to a folder (the one I was opening). Well, all these windows and programs fired up extremely fast! It was like a strobe light with all that was coming up at the same time! But. They all opened very quickly and the file copy from the drive never skipped a beat. I simply closed all the windows one at a time and went about my business. But it showed me how much the system could handle all at once. It was a very impressive mistake that taught me a lot about my system. I love my Mac Pro.
I was checking in to a MacPro and although there are no applications that are currently available that will utilize the dual processor, as the Investment will be for several years, it is probably worth the investment.
Yes, there will be some speed difference with the faster processors but will you really notice it? Not for the money. Down the road when prices drop will be the best time to upgrade.
I just got the dual quad 2.8. I had considered a single quad, since the duals are not well utilized at the moment. However, as Brit said, I am assuming they will be more effectively utilized in the future. I would like the new computer to last as long as possible and, unlike memory, the second processor cannot be added later. I also added 8 gb of ram.
I would recommend a single 3.0GHz, should be more than fast enough in the Mac Pro. You can always add another processor in the future.
Talking of green, I keep meaning to buy one of those devices which tell you how much electricity an appliance is using, I hate to think how much my Mac Pro is using!
great question as i am looking at new box and was holding off for intels release of i7 but am eligible for apple educational discount and speced out mac pro with dual 2.8's and 4 gb ram along with nvidia card.
monitor offered in my range was 23" but appple online store shows it as discontinued and not such good user reviews either.
any comments on setup?
i love nx2 but it is so resource/memory hungry and my box is old so time for upgrade.
chevysales wrote:
great question as i am looking at new box and was holding off for intels release of i7 but am eligible for apple educational discount and speced out mac pro with dual 2.8's and 4 gb ram along with nvidia card.
monitor offered in my range was 23" but appple online store shows it as discontinued and not such good user reviews either.
any comments on setup?
i love nx2 but it is so resource/memory hungry and my box is old so time for upgrade.
does Apple verify the "educational discounts"??
....btw- I just spec'ed up a 'ed' system thru Apple and it shows the 23" display available.(I have read many favorable things about this display for photo editing....)
I do not know. I asked about this at the Apple store and that is what they told me. Perhaps you should look into it further. Are the processors on ebay for the current systems or an older one
When searching, I only found statements that you "should" be able to add one. I did not find anyone who actually did it. (i did not look very hard)
you can't add the second processor later because the motherboard between the single
and dual processor is different and there is no place to add the second processor on the single cpu mobo.
reality is that for what we do, the 2nd quad-core is 95% a waste of money but then again it depends on how long you realistically expect to use the machine. It boils down to how the software is written and what can be distributed over multiple cores.
The second processor CAN be added later on the Mac Pro 1.1
You can upgrade to faster, downgrade to slower, add, or remove procs as you like. Tho Apple doesn't support it - so you may be killing your warrantee. I changed mine all around and still got service. I got an impish grin from the service guy tho. I dunno about later models but I would assume the same to be true. I am aware generally of all the hardware changes made between mine (v1.1) and the latest quad mb revision and there's nothing that would suggest otherwise. If Apple made a single socket MB I'm not aware of it. The single processor Mac Pro 1.1 had an empty socket.
As far as speed goes it totally depends on the apps you're running. I got my 8-core at a lower speed 2.66 only because I knew for sure how the apps I was intending to run would profile in the system. Maya, Lightwave3D, the new Mac version of Houdini, Final Cut - Motion etc., all scale exceptionally well so 21GHz of power (self-upgraded) at a low price was what I was going for. If I was intending only to use PhotoShop (CS2 at the time), Aperture, music editing, web browsing - all the fun stuff I do non-professionally - I would not have selected this system. Either the 3.2GHz MacPro system or the 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. The 3.06GHz iMac will be faster at those things than my 8-core 2.66GHz xeon and at about the same price.
Bifurcator wrote:
The second processor CAN be added later on the Mac Pro 1.1
You can upgrade to faster, downgrade to slower, add, or remove procs as you like. Tho Apple doesn't support it - so you may be killing your warrantee. I changed mine all around and still got service. I got an impish grin from the service guy tho. I dunno about later models but I would assume the same to be true. I am aware generally of all the hardware changes made between mine (v1.1) and the latest quad mb revision and there's nothing that would suggest otherwise. If Apple made a single socket MB I'm not aware of it. The single processor Mac Pro 1.1 had an empty socket.
As far as speed goes it totally depends on the apps you're running. I got my 8-core at a lower speed 2.66 only because I knew for sure how the apps I was intending to run would profile in the system. Maya, Lightwave3D, the new Mac version of Houdini, Final Cut - Motion etc., all scale exceptionally well so 21GHz of power (self-upgraded) at a low price was what I was going for. If I was intending only to use PhotoShop (CS2 at the time), Aperture, music editing, web browsing - all the fun stuff I do non-professionally - I would not have selected this system. Either the 3.2GHz MacPro system or the 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac. The 3.06GHz iMac will be faster at those things than my 8-core 2.66GHz xeon and at about the same price.
Thanks Bifucator!
I have only found the single quad 2.8 as an option(no 3.2) at this point....but I think if what you say is true, no sense in spending money now on a processor going for the dual...but to save $ and go for the Single. Especially since I will mostly be just driving Aperture or like plus or minus a few others... I currently have an iMac 2.4 24"(So the 3.06 iMac doesn't have a good appeal, but thats for the tip anyway- but I really want to move to the flexablity of a separate Display and the ability to modify the computer on a need basis.
The rule of thumb is buy copious RAM before you pay up for a 20% bump in CPU speed because when you are out of RAM swapping out to a HD is much slower than ample RAM and a 2.8GHz processor.
Buying more processor(s) than you need (unless for proximate upcoming applications) is seldom a good economic protocol. That's because Apple (and the others) are aggressively obsoleting their products with more powerful releases. Typically a more powerful computer is needed for new software demands.
Switching to big RAW files was the reason I went to a MacPro from a PC. Now I enjoy is the stability of the MAC OS platform which lets me run one or two PhotoShops, Bridge, a browser, two virtual PCs, etc. When a rare crash happens it's a program and not the OS. Indeed Window XP runs better on my virtual PC better than it did on my real PC.
Good link Hammy! Notice how PS and Aperture scale almost identically with either 4 or 8 procs. The extra cores don't make a difference (for those apps!). If I wanted the MacPro and I was editing images mostly I would get the single proc, super-slow one and then go on-line and find a good deal on a used 3.2 and then sell the slower one to offset the cost a little. You'll have 4 cores at 3.2GHz and later when those chips are $500 or less I'd get the second one for 8 cores. By then hopefully, apps like PS will scale better over multiple cores too.
Maybe Bifurcator can chime in here, but I understand that dual CPUs need to have the same stepping (minor design changes are called steppings). If you buy a single CPU machine now you'll need to ensure that you buy a matched CPU when and if you want to add a second. I've never owned a Mac, but I understand this was a requirement for a Windows machine.
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