I got a Mac Pro a couple weeks ago. It’s an awesome machine. I got the four core CPU one, not the 8 core. That saved $500, which I then spent on upgrading the memory and hard drive space and video cards.
Specs- 1 Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.8 GHz CPU
- 6 GB DDR2 FB-DIMM 800 MHz memory
- 1.3 TB disk space (seagate 7200 rpm hard drives) in RAID 0
- 2 ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphic cards
- 1 30 inch Dell LCD and 3 20 inch Dell LCDs
- Microsoft Natural Optical Wireless Keyboard / Mouse
- Airport Extreme N
- It’s very fast and silent.
- Upgrading the memory and hard disk space was pretty damn easy. No tools or cables or anything needed.
- Looks nice, feels sturdy and well designed
- Supports lots of graphic cards
- Very expandable. Not sure if I can upgrade the CPU, but can upgrade memory to 32GB.
- Freaking fast
- Time Machine won’t work. Time Machine needs the ID of one of your ethernet devices, and in my log file I get this error: “Failed to get MAC address for machine”. And then it refuses to back anything up. Grr.
- The airport extreme wireless card didn’t seem to want to connect to my existing wireless router (Linksys 54G). I got one of the new Airport Extreme wireless N routers and that didn’t work either. Then I changed the wireless channel and it seemed to work. So perhaps the old one would’ve worked if I changed the channel. But N is fast, wireless transfers from downstairs to upstairs go at about 4-5 megabytes per second. And the range is good.
It’s a fairly pricy machine, but I expect it to last for a long time. And since I’m on it for 8 hours a day at least, it makes sense to get what will work best.
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