Apple Launches Core i7 Powered Mac Pro

[wolf]

I totally agree, I build all of my rigs.

However, that doesn't escape the fact that the Mac Pro is a beast and is professional by any means.

no doubt man, this is a sexy sleek beast, and ive done professional video editing before on a dual Xeon Mac that was damn beefy.

pity about the OS tho it and i have a disagreement.

It thinks its funny to reboot during my editing projects.

And i disagree.

 

[Ravenas]

no doubt man, this is a sexy sleek beast, and ive done professional video editing before on a dual Xeon Mac that was damn beefy.

pity about the OS tho it and i have a disagreement.

It thinks its funny to reboot during my editing projects.

And i disagree.

Yeah they are very nice... My father owns some preowned car dealerships in the Chattanooga area and I visited a startup advertising company my dad uses called Carfinderz (they use 5 Mac Pros).

I watch them start from scratch really, because I was working next to the headquarters at one of my dad's dealerships. Anyway one day I went over to their office and they let me hope on those Mac Pros... They are soo beefy when it comes to editing. Super fast. 30" apple monitors at 1650 x 1200, running 6 different pages of a magazine in photoshop while popping in and out of bridge all the time is f'ing sweet.

 

[newtekie1]

If I am not mistaken, the previous model was shipped with a 2600...

As the base GPU, yes. However, it offered all the way up to a Quadro with 1.5GB of RAM. The RAM is the important part, especially in the professional market. Not including the option for anything higher than 512MB of vRAM, especially with the market moving more and more towards GPU processing, is just stupid. And the other option of 4 9500GT's isn't any better as they are severally underpowered for the work they are intended.

It's not exactly meant to be a gaming system.

You are correct, and my statement had nothing to do with gaming.

I think you can put like 4 4870s in this thing. lol... It's such a beast.

EDIT: NVM, you can have 4x NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 512MB. Which really isn't bad either.

4x 9500GT's is bad, from a professional standpoint. They are very underpowered.

Come on! This will be one amazing gaming and production machine. Don't let your hatred get in the way of your logic.

This is clearly one serious machine. You would have to spend an incredible amount of money to build a PC that could compete against the Mac Pro and then you would have a machine that wouldn't look as good and couldn't legally (or reliably) run Mac OS X and Windows.

It is mostly in the looks and brand name, and I will give it to you that the OS is worth some extra money. However, hardware wise, it is a huge rip-off. It would suck at gaming, unless you put the HD4870 in it, and even then it would be limitted by the 512MB, and it certainly would be a huge let down for $2500. A much better machine could be built for the money.

We understand man, a Mac Pro priced at $22,000 dollars with 2 Xeons with 8 running cores, 32 GB of ram, 4 graphics cards, 4 TB of space, and some of the best editing software on the planet isn't professional enough for you.

The only thing that peaks my interest is the editting software, but even then, an iMac runs all the propriatery software just fine, I'd rather have a cheaper Windows machine that was equally as powerful.

 

[Ravenas]

4x 9500GT's is bad, from a professional standpoint. They are very underpowered.

If you need something more powerful I'm sure Apple can accommodate that for you. I mean how do you think Pixar got by?

 

[newtekie1]

If you need something more powerful I'm sure Apple can accommodate that for you. I mean how do you think Pixar got by?

Not in this configuration. Your options are 4x 9500GTs w/ 512MB or an HD4870 512MB. Both suck for the work this computer is intended to do.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

They would have to release new firmware to accommodate you which isn't too likely. Remember, Apple products are appliances (something you throw away) and not machines (something you repair). If they don't have what you need, you'll have to wait until they decide to offer something better. If they don't, well, tough luck (ehm, get Windows, Linux, or some other accommodating/flexible OS).

 

[DrPepper]

If you need something more powerful I'm sure Apple can accommodate that for you. I mean how do you think Pixar got by?

Out of curiosity and OT what do pixar use to design and render thier movies. I heard they used 4870's to design Monsters inc

 

[steelkane]

Now a days mac is just a name,, as soon as they started to use intel hardware, it became a pc,, & I'm sure you could install vista on one just like you could install mac os on a pc. as I see it, pc won the fight.

 

[Ravenas]

Out of curiosity and OT what do pixar use to design and render thier movies. I heard they used 4870's to design Monsters inc

Well since Job's owned Pixar and is still on the board of Disney, and Disney vise versa ( I think), I'm sure they used custom Mac Pros.

 

[FordGT90Concept]

Out of curiosity and OT what do pixar use to design and render thier movies. I heard they used 4870's to design Monsters inc

Since Pixar was purchased by Disney from Jobs and Jobs has a board seat with Disney, I'd imagine they are still using Apple computers. No idea what specific hardware they are using though.


Dreamworks (not directly connected to a hardware vendor) uses Linux powered IBM servers for rendering and HP desktops for content creation.


Edit: Ravenas beat me to it. XD

 

[Ravenas]

Since Pixar was purchased by Disney from Jobs and Jobs has a board seat with Disney, I'd imagine they are still using Apple computers. No idea what specific hardware they are using though.


Dreamworks (not directly connected to a hardware vendor) uses Linux powered IBM servers for rendering and HP desktops for content creation.


Edit: Ravenas beat me to it. XD

Lol...

Here's a quick reference of movies that came out of Pixar as well:

The first film produced by the partnership, Toy Story, brought fame and critical acclaim to the studio when it was released in 1995. Over the next ten plus years, under Pixar's creative chief John Lasseter, the company would produce the box-office hits A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), and WALL-E (2008). Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E each received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, an award introduced in 2001.

I would say these are arll pretty well done animated movies...

 

[Ravenas]

Not in this configuration. Your options are 4x 9500GTs w/ 512MB or an HD4870 512MB. Both suck for the work this computer is intended to do.

Yeah agree... Not in the configurations you can come up with online. However, I'm pretty sure corporations can have Apple arrange some sort of deal the machines can be custom made.

 

[Binge]

If you need something more powerful I'm sure Apple can accommodate that for you. I mean how do you think Pixar got by?

lol Pixar isn't all macs also WHY would (insert company on a budget) want to buy a CUSTOM apple setup when it can be built and coded by your own tech people/designers? Oh wait, if you're into the industry that's making t-shirts, cafe menus, and low end advertisements then forget a custom machine. It's not needed! Neither is apple's software at the uber-pro level. We have no idea what this motherboard can do or if it has any bugs/snags running 2xi7 "Xenon" cpus. I can tell you running that thing on stock cooling will kill that mac in no time.

 

[Easy Rhino]

ive used one of these running the dual quad 775 xeons and they smoke for rendering HD video. perfect pro-sumer solution/

 

[Easy Rhino]

go to the apple website and configure one of these. if you want the dual quads at 2.93 with 32 gigs ram and 4 1 TB raided drives and 4x nvidia gt 120s with the mac software it costs almost $15,000.

 

[Nick89]

I'm more impressed they have a Radeon HD 4870 in one. Has apple finally realized some people may want to do more than check their mail? Anyway I still say its over priced.



Welcome to Apple.

I agree that it is over priced.

 

[Ravenas]

I agree that it is over priced.

I think any desktop built by any company is overpriced.

 

[newtekie1]

Out of curiosity and OT what do pixar use to design and render thier movies. I heard they used 4870's to design Monsters inc

Assuming Pixar was using Apple hardware, and just because Apple had a ownership stake, that doesn't mean they used Apple hardware, the main workhorse for most of their movies was probably Power Macs with workstation cards in them. In fact they probably still do use the older Power Macs, or the last generation Mac Pros that still offered decent graphics options.

 

[ShadowFold]

I remember seing an ad that said Pixar used AMD Opteron's to make their movies but that was around the time shrek came out. I don't think apple uses AMD stuff..

 

[Ravenas]

Here's what Pixar makes their movies with:

and this is what their offices look like:

 

[DrPepper]

Pixar death machines is what they are

 

[Ravenas]

Pixar death machines is what they are

In my opinion, I think Jobs is probably their goto guy for getting hardware. He's a huge figure in silicon valley. Just my opinion though.

 

[DrPepper]

In my opinion, I think Jobs is probably their goto guy for getting hardware. He's a huge figure in silicon valley. Just my opinion though.

Hmm but maybe he doesn't recommend them apple macs while he worked there. I heard they used regular workstations and rendered them on server farms like the one you showed.

 

[Ravenas]

Hmm but maybe he doesn't recommend them apple macs while he worked there. I heard they used regular workstations and rendered them on server farms like the one you showed.

Idk... Maybe. The picture above clearly shows that his office is equipped with a iMac and a Macbook Pro.

 

[DrPepper]

Looks like he has an apple macbook though.