Apr 12 2008
New machine: A Mac Pro moved in
I found one of those few real bargain deals on eBay a few days ago, and yesterday morning, a Mac Pro with two Dual Core 2 GHz Xeon CPUs and 8 GB RAM moved in. Another Cinema Display was also part of the package, but it is still on its way. So in the end, I will have two 20″ Apple Cinema Displays and a 24″ HP monitor. The best part is that the equipment is still in the regular warranty that can be extended to three years of Apple Care, and I will go for it.
Aperture just flies on that machine. The raw processing power of the Mac Pro is simply unbelievable. And the best part: It’s not even noisy, as you’d expect a machine of that caliber to be. The loudest noise still comes from the hard disks. Okay, there is a humming from the cooling fans, but it is on a low frequency that neither disturbs me nor does it trigger headaches, as high-frequency or screaming noise would do.
The graphics card of the Mac Pro is not the fastest, at least not for games. It’s an nVidia 7300GT with 256MB memory, and according to some tests, it’s slower than the ATI X1600 that was in my iMac Core Duo. But that didn’t keep my from buying a second one on eBay. The Mac Pro supports up to four of these nVidia cards, and I need the second one to connect the third monitor to my system. Having another display is more useful to me than having faster gaming graphics.
But for those who are interested, Unreal Tournament 2004 for Mac runs at maximum details at 1920×1200 on this machine, and even the artificial intelligence for 30 bots does not slow down the Mac at all. Doom 3 for Mac also performs beautifully at maximum settings. Crysis on Windows Vista is a different beast, though: On full details at 1680×1050, it was an unplayable dia show. With an 8800GT it would probably run great on that Xeon machine, but who cares? I finally deleted Vista from my system and will sell it on eBay, so it just doesn’t matter. I have an Xbox 360 for gaming, and the Mac is for applications and geek stuff.
Anyway. This machine just feels ‘right’, and the short message is that computing is fun again.
