Apple releases 8-core Mac Pro

Sweet, now the "old" Mac Pro's will drop in price, might be time to grab one.

edit: Doesn't look like they dropped the previous model, just added the 8 core option.
 
valve1138 said:
Sweet, now the "old" Mac Pro's will drop in price, might be time to grab one.
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Well. . .Apple currently has these refurbs -
- Quad 2.66GHz @ $2199
- Quad 3GHz @ $3299

At these prices, go for the new 8-way - if you can wait for it to start shipping, that is. Perhaps the refurbs haven't been price-adjusted yet.
 
well, that's gonna make my friend AWFULLY pissed as he just ordered a few Mac Pros for his business on Monday! :D

I bet he can change the order though since it's a business account and bulk order.
 
Yup, nothing to see here. All they did was add a $1499 option to have two quad-core chips. Nothing else was changed. Useless update if you ask me. How old is the x1900 now?
 
How old is the x1900 now?
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It may very well be old, but the drivers are a hell of a lot better than the ones for my 8800GTX. :mad: In a Mac, the X1900XT is probably the ideal choice.


To be honest, I think $4500 for an eight core 3GHz Mac Pro with 2 gigs of memory and an X1900XT is quite cheap. It's probably less than we paid for our eight core 1.86GHz Dell blades, and a good 60% faster.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
To be honest, I think $4500 for an eight core 3GHz Mac Pro with 2 gigs of memory and an X1900XT is quite cheap. It's probably less than we paid for our eight core 1.86GHz Dell blades, and a good 60% faster.
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Yeah, isn't it nearly 1k a chip for a 3GHz Clovertown? Probably another 500 or so for the mobo, and the FB-DIMMs aren't cheap either.
 
Scroatdog said:
Yup, nothing to see here. All they did was add a $1499 option to have two quad-core chips. Nothing else was changed. Useless update if you ask me. How old is the x1900 now?
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You also have to remember that for a significant portion of the Mac Pro's target audience the standard video card is just fine. For Photoshop, Quark, InDesign, etc work, the included card is fast enough. For those apps, the memory bandwidth on the Mac Pro is a bigger bottleneck than the video card.
 
:rolleyes: Not what I was hoping for, although I expected it.


No new video card options

No memory bandwidth increase.

V. small price drops*.


The only users that are happy with this update are administrators of large servers. If you buy the system barebones an add in your own drives and RAM later, the new flagship Mac Pro is a pretty cheap way to get ahold of two 3ghz Clovertown Xeons. Hell, the 2.66ghz quad clovertowns are retailing for $1400+.

*Some are suggesting that there was no price drop, however I think there were a few price drops. Just off the top, 4gb ram option is +699 instead of +899, the optional 500gb drives are +329 instead of +400, and the ACD 30 is +1799 instead of +1999. Still, none of these new prices are as low as buying them 3rd party.
 
Even the "old" mac pro's can be upgraded to the Clovertown CPUs. Anandtech did this months ago.
 
Would could you do with an 8 core duo? I am thinking of buying the mac but not sure though is mac easily upgradeable? Or you just send to the factory and than pay them and they upgrade like the ipods ?
 
It's not "duo" any more. I know it's confusing, but just call em Clovertowns. Anyway, as for what you can do with them, not that much. Not too many programs can spawn 8 threads.

8 cores will be taken full advantage of by Adobe's CS3 suite, 3D graphics modelling, video editing, sound editing, scientific applications, and servers. Even if you're a heavy multitasker, you probably won't be able to max out 4 cores for quite a while.

When you ask about upgrades, the answer is it depends. The case design makes it pretty easy to pop in a new harddrive or optical drive, but more than that, they're relativelyungradeable. If you're used to messing around in your PC, you have to give that up if you go Apple. It's not necessarily a bad tradeoff, but there is one.
 
mason.kramer said:
It's not "duo" any more. I know it's confusing, but just call em Clovertowns. Anyway, as for what you can do with them, not that much. Not too many programs can spawn 8 threads.

8 cores will be taken full advantage of by Adobe's CS3 suite, 3D graphics modelling, video editing, sound editing, scientific applications, and servers. Even if you're a heavy multitasker, you probably won't be able to max out 4 cores for quite a while.

When you ask about upgrades, the answer is it depends. The case design makes it pretty easy to pop in a new harddrive or optical drive, but more than that, they're relativelyungradeable. If you're used to messing around in your PC, you have to give that up if you go Apple. It's not necessarily a bad tradeoff, but there is one.
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mac pros didn't have core processors in the first place...they had (still do) xeons...

but your right, it wouldn't be duo...it would be...quad......o :p
 
Current Xeons are still based upon the Core 2 architecture, unless I'm mistaken.

It's semantics, but eh.
 
bullseye4u said:
Would could you do with an 8 core duo? I am thinking of buying the mac but not sure though is mac easily upgradeable? Or you just send to the factory and than pay them and they upgrade like the ipods ?
Click to expand...
Folding@Home :D

If you have a dual dual core machine you can just swap out the CPU's from what I've heard.
 
bullseye4u said:
Would could you do with an 8 core duo? I am thinking of buying the mac but not sure though is mac easily upgradeable? Or you just send to the factory and than pay them and they upgrade like the ipods ?
Click to expand...

If you have to ask then you don't really need one :D
 
the only reason anyone would need this is intense rendering video gurus....

or just for your e-penis.....
 
Did I mention I was rendering well over 100 megapixels worth of still images today? I want one of those eight cores, damnit!
 
movax said:
Yeah, isn't it nearly 1k a chip for a 3GHz Clovertown? Probably another 500 or so for the mobo, and the FB-DIMMs aren't cheap either.
Click to expand...

well, it's about $1200 per chip for the retail 2.66ghz model...soooo in all reality, the octacore isn't a bad buy.
 
bahula03 said:
well, it's about $1200 per chip for the retail 2.66ghz model...soooo in all reality, the octacore isn't a bad buy.
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If you can wait 'til July, the 2.66 Xeons are slated to drop to seven hundred something dollars, around the same time the 3.0 chips are made generally available, for $12xx.
 
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