The Mac Pro is here... not so impressive?

guilly

guilly

Too handsome to use a PC
I don't know if I've got the wrong feeling about this, but the new Mac Pro does not seem so impressive to me. According to Apple test results, the Mac Pro with the Quad Intel Xeon CPU running at 2,66 GHz performs 0,3 points better at the Cinebench test (just to give an example which is in my opinion very useful to measure the power of a computer) than the Quad G5 running at 2,5 GHz. The improvement seems slight and, worst of all, taking in account that the tests were conducted by Apple the result is more than suspicious.

We will have to wait for the first home made tests since I feel that the IBM PowerPC G5 processor seems to be quite a competitor for Intel.
 
Well, the top end Xeon based Mac Pro is up to 1.8 times faster so that's really close to 2 times faster than the top end PowerMac Quad. Now you get quads on the whole lineup so that's a plus. We'll have to wait for people to get ahold of them but this was somewhat expected. The G5 is still pretty powerful but it's not being maintained and updated as fast as Intel's chips are. I think most people weren't expecting a huge jump in performance like we got with the MacBooks and MacBook Pros since they had only the really weak old G4 chip.

I'm betting IBM doesn't continue much development on the G5 and Intel chips will continue to outpace whatever IBM could have produced had Apple stayed with them.
 
I'm alright with the internals of the Mac Pro. The G5 quad was a friggin' beast, and to put it plainly, 2 times as fast as that thing is just fine for me. The thing that made me feel disappointment was that the case stayed the same. I was looking forward to something different.
 
I like the point that Phil made, showing how the price of Macs are better than Dell. I am consistently trying to tell people to compare prices, when they consider buying a new computer, and are considering a Mac.
 
Of course no one that's saying the Macs are expensive are looking to buy a workstation Dell either. So they compare the bottom model for $500 to the Mac Pro since it's a similar form factor.
 
Wow, maybe I'm the only one here that's absolutely drooling over the new Mac Pro machines... I mean, damn! 4 hard drives in an awesome layout. Awesome graphics card options. 16GB of RAM. 64-bit computing. Quad cores, all models. Speeds up to 3.0GHz. Dual optical drives. I mean, come on, how much improvement over the G5 can you have in one revision?

What exactly is missing (or unchanged) that caused you to be disappointed with the machine?
 
This doesn't seem surprising to me. I never expected a HUGE performance increase with the pro. Why? Because the G5 was, as Qion said, a beast. Ever since Apple announced the Intel switch, people have been acting like the G5 is a pathetic little slug. It's not. Woodcrest is the first chip Intel has that can be considered a real successor. The G5 was ahead of its time from day 1.

On top of that, video has long been the Macs strongest point. Again, it's no surprise that the G5 holds its own here. If anything, I'm surprised that the Intel machine beat it at all! Especially since they were working with a beta version of FCP. 30-40% faster seems impressive to me!


As for the price, Macs haven't been much more expensive than similar PCs in a long time. The problem is Apple doesn't offer any machines that are equivalent to the cheapest machines on the PC side.


I agree that it's not revolutionary. But...well, neither was the iMac, or the Mini, or even the MacBook. They were basically the same design with an Intel chip and better RAM and whatnot. Same with the Mac Pro, which is basically what I expected.
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Wow, maybe I'm the only one here that's absolutely drooling over the new Mac Pro machines... I mean, damn! 4 hard drives in an awesome layout. Awesome graphics card options. 16GB of RAM. 64-bit computing. Quad cores, all models. Speeds up to 3.0GHz. Dual optical drives. I mean, come on, how much improvement over the G5 can you have in one revision?

What exactly is missing (or unchanged) that caused you to be disappointed with the machine?
Click to expand...
No remote control or built in camera. Heh.

Kap
 
I'd say the performance is certainly more than alright. As has been said, the quad G5 was a beast, and comparing the 2.66 GHz model should be done to the previous single processor dual-core G5. ;) There you'd see a greater difference, I'm sure.
The harddrives are free space put to very good use, I think.

And yeah: What's missing is a cheaper pro model. There simply is no desktop inbetween. The iMac, some might say, but that's got a screen attached, which makes it an upgrade nightmare. Where's the "normal" desktop machine with a single dual-core Conroe processor? Oh well. :) Can't have everything, I guess...
 
ElDiabloConCaca said:
Wow, maybe I'm the only one here that's absolutely drooling over the new Mac Pro machines... I mean, damn! 4 hard drives in an awesome layout. Awesome graphics card options. 16GB of RAM. 64-bit computing. Quad cores, all models. Speeds up to 3.0GHz. Dual optical drives.
Click to expand...
You're not the only one drooling over them...

I'm thinking really hard about one:

Dual 3.0gHz
2GB RAM
One 500GB HD
512MB ATI X1900XT
23" Cinema HD
Dual Superdrives
Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR
Airport Extreme
------------------------
$4844.00 (3-5 weeks)
 
I think I might go into shock if I were to ever switch from a G4 to a Mac Pro with a 23" LCD. Too much, well, superiority. It would give me a complex for the rest of my life ;).

But really, it seems like these things are actually getting too fast. Everybody wants "faster, faster!", and all I can say is "G4's actually function, you know?". That's why I think it's ridiculous when somebody complains about 2x as fast as (about) the fastest desktop machine out there. How could you possibly utilize that much power without having astronomically high ammounts of scientific data to crunch? Hell, I thought it was amazing what withdrawl I went through when I worked on somebody's 20" iMac by my eMac.
 
Those who are under-whelmed by this machine, need a reality check. Seriously. Its almost 2 times faster than the PowerMac before it. 2 times faster! What took 4 minutes before, now takes 2 minutes.

Just because its not 4-5 times faster when comparing slower PowerPC chips to Intel chip comparisons.

Honestly, its probably what, 3000 times faster than the Apple II. Now, THATS IMPRESSIVE!
 
ScottW said:
Honestly, its probably what, 3000 times faster than the Apple II. Now, THATS IMPRESSIVE!
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Too bad most software is 4000 times slower. ;) Not really...but it sure seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Ahh, the old days...
 
Yeah. My old Atari 1040 STf crashed MUCH more quickly. ;) ... Yeah, I often get the feeling too, that things were much faster in the old days. But then I remember things like copying a floppy disk. *MINUTES* for less than a megabyte?! ;) Reality check says: Computers _do_more nowadays. (Well, sometimes it might seem as if they should do less, of course.)
 
Guilly: You are crazy? I am drooling at MacPro. Its damn impressed me. What more it's 12 ghz! When you switch to XP. Whoa.. fast! Argh, I have to sell my Macs. To get one.. grin!
 
All specs aside, I sure like the new sales model of offering only one base configuration and letting the buyer add in or take out what he or she wants.

I wasn't happy about the case design staying the same. I was hoping for something a little smaller and quite frankly, better looking. But in the end it doesn't matter because it sits in a cabinet in my desk anyway.

I would also like to see the Cinema Displays add an iSight camera to them - which I guess could be coming soon considering they lowered the price of the existing Cinema Displays. Also would like to see the "glossy" option added to the Cinema Display line.
 
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