Has anyone gone from a Windows 7 machine to an Apple and thought OMG...

[WelshBloke]

You can indeed! Buuut I did say "Run OSX as well as a Mac" which in my experience (though others disagree) it can't.

It can be exactly the same hardware so I don't see why not.

 

[bfdd]

No you can't do that. The page file contrary to what many people believe is required. Creating a ram disk and putting it on there is like rolling down the window and taking a leak while zipping down the highway too! :biggrin:

The only substitute for more ram is more ram.

Guess what? I got a fever and the only prescription is... more ram

 

[HAL9000]

It can be exactly the same hardware so I don't see why not.

It's not the same hardware, it's the same components but a different motherboard running an EFI rather than a BIOS

 

[WelshBloke]

It's not the same hardware, it's the same components but a different motherboard running an EFI rather than a BIOS

Does that actually make any difference when you're in the OS though?

And I thought that there were some MSI motherboards out with EFI at the moment?

 

[Arkaign]

It's not the same hardware, it's the same components but a different motherboard running an EFI rather than a BIOS

Same whoop, functionally EFI and Bios get out of the way once they've done their particular jobs and they sit on the sidelines unless you interact with them in some way.

If we're going to do car comparisons :

A new iMac is kind of like a VW Golf, nice enough, well designed, perhaps a little wanting for power, and really a bit of style over substance for the $.

A new Mac Pro is like a well loaded entry-lux sedan. Stylish, good performance, about twice the price of an average entry midsize car.

PCs can be anything from shitbox Tata Nanos to freaking Veyron Supersports, and everything in between. It's as much as your budget and imagination will allow. You also get access to new stuff a lot faster. Want that GTX580SLI set with custom liquid cooling combined with overclocked dual i7-980X hex-cores @ 4+ghz each? Can't do that with a Mac, but then again there aren't a whole lot of folks that can afford that kind of madcap badassery.

Meh.

EDIT : For clarification, I should have said 'Dual Xeon 5680' instead of 980X

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Holy fuck, you are one stupid dickscarf. Go away.

 

[HAL9000]

Same whoop, functionally EFI and Bios get out of the way once they've done their particular jobs and they sit on the sidelines unless you interact with them in some way.

If we're going to do car comparisons :

A new iMac is kind of like a VW Golf, nice enough, well designed, perhaps a little wanting for power, and really a bit of style over substance for the $.

A new Mac Pro is like a well loaded entry-lux sedan. Stylish, good performance, about twice the price of an average entry midsize car.

PCs can be anything from shitbox Tata Nanos to freaking Veyron Supersports, and everything in between. It's as much as your budget and imagination will allow. You also get access to new stuff a lot faster. Want that GTX580SLI set with custom liquid cooling combined with overclocked dual i7-980X hex-cores @ 4+ghz each? Can't do that with a Mac, but then again there aren't a whole lot of folks that can afford that kind of madcap badassery.

Meh.

EDIT : For clarification, I should have said 'Dual Xeon 5680' instead of 980X

Those seem fair, although you can have Dual Xeon 5680's in a Mac Pro, and you can water cool them, and you could install a GTX580 SLI, if you so wished.

 

[Arkaign]

Those seem fair, although you can have Dual Xeon 5680's in a Mac Pro, and you can water cool them, and you could install a GTX580 SLI, if you so wished.

Can't do it, not really.

http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html

(1) Mac Pro doesn't have a dual full-speed PCI-E 2.0 16X capability, if you put a 2nd GPU in it reduces the speed. Best official dual video cards supported are dual 5770s.

(2) If you're running OSX (why run a Mac if you're not gonna run OSX?), you can't run any non-supported video cards (there aren't many to choose from). GTX580 is definitely not an option.

(3) No overclocking for the dual CPUs.

(4) 980W PSU = too weak for dual GTX580 + Dual Gulftown OC even if you could make it work (you can't).

(5) Xeon 5680 not supported by latest Mac Pro (yet), though it technically should work.

(6) 32GB max memory is pretty weak considering EVGA-SR2 supports 48GB (official).

(7) No USB 3 on Mac Pro? Sad considering the $.

(8) 'Super' Drive doesn't do BluRay/BDRom? Fail.

(9) Stock drive support is pretty thin, no support for Tri/Quad SLI either.

All in all, it's cool, but it's a little outdated in some key areas compared to top of the line, and there are some critical limitations that make it pretty weak in contrast.

 

[HAL9000]

Can't do it, not really.

http://www.apple.com/macpro/specs.html

(1) Mac Pro doesn't have a dual full-speed PCI-E 2.0 16X capability, if you put a 2nd GPU in it reduces the speed. Best official dual video cards supported are dual 5770s.

(2) If you're running OSX (why run a Mac if you're not gonna run OSX?), you can't run any non-supported video cards (there aren't many to choose from). GTX580 is definitely not an option.

(3) No overclocking for the dual CPUs.

(4) 980W PSU = too weak for dual GTX580 + Dual Gulftown OC even if you could make it work (you can't).

(5) Xeon 5680 not supported by latest Mac Pro (yet), though it technically should work.

(6) 32GB max memory is pretty weak considering EVGA-SR2 supports 48GB (official).

(7) No USB 3 on Mac Pro? Sad considering the $.

(8) 'Super' Drive doesn't do BluRay/BDRom? Fail.

(9) Stock drive support is pretty thin, no support for Tri/Quad SLI either.

All in all, it's cool, but it's a little outdated in some key areas compared to top of the line, and there are some critical limitations that make it pretty weak in contrast.

(1) Not a lot of cards saturate 8x PCIe 2.0 My 5870 doesn't, my 5970 lost about 3 fps.

(2) True, but whats the point of having dual cards in OSX, when there aren't the games to use them?

(3) True

(4) I just installed an optical drive PSU 450w for my second card, cost me $20

(5) Works fine - http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=781908

(6) Current Mac Pro's support up to 64GB of RAM

(7) USB 3.0 works fine in Mac Pro, you just need a PCIe card, for about $35

(8) You can buy (and I have) a blu ray drive for your mac.

(9) Not sure what you mean about "stock drive support" You could do try Cfire or SLI, but you would be restricted to 4x for one card.

 

[Arkaign]

Oh yeah, forgot about the newer 8gb memory modules. The SR-2 has 12 slots, which are compatible with that chipset

I couldn't afford 96GB of ram though lol.

It seems that a lot of the primary issues are the lack of overclocking/multigpu support really. Add to that for the price of a Mac Pro you can build a PC that makes it look like a Yugo. They are idiotically expensive.

Check this out, just configged a Mac Pro at Apple site, $6,649.

Specs :

Two Xeon 5670 2.93ghz CPUs
12GB DDR3-1333 Memory (6x2GB, yuck)
No Raid, Single 1TB 7200RPM Drive
Single 5770
No monitors
No options whatsoever (Fibre, iWork, Final Cut, etc).

That is a TOTAL ripoff. Really beyond the expensive mobo and CPUs, everything else is average to crap, and they want almost 7 grand for it, without even a basic display, ssd, anything. Config it with a couple average things like an SSD, 24GB of ram, and a monitor, and you're looking at 10k. Who buys this shit?

 

[Scarpozzi]

Personally, I hate wearing scarves and turtlenecks in the summer so I don't bother with Mac....

If you like the styling and want solid hardware...fine buy one. Just be aware that service and replacement parts will be a little higher if you intend to keep it after the warranty runs out. You may actually have more luck finding parts for it than the standard toshiba/hp/dell since they change models more frequently these days.... What always cracked me up was the folks who spent all that money for a new MacBook Pro just so they could do dual boot/parallels/etc to run Windows more than 50% of the time.

There's no reason I would want a Mac since I do no graphic design...I've worked with them for years though. Macbooks, LC IIIs, PowerPCs, Cubes, X Servers, XRAID, etc...they're just not my favorite.

 

[MrX8503]

Oh yeah, forgot about the newer 8gb memory modules. The SR-2 has 12 slots, which are compatible with that chipset

I couldn't afford 96GB of ram though lol.

It seems that a lot of the primary issues are the lack of overclocking/multigpu support really. Add to that for the price of a Mac Pro you can build a PC that makes it look like a Yugo. They are idiotically expensive.

Check this out, just configged a Mac Pro at Apple site, $6,649.

Specs :

Two Xeon 5670 2.93ghz CPUs
12GB DDR3-1333 Memory (6x2GB, yuck)
No Raid, Single 1TB 7200RPM Drive
Single 5770
No monitors
No options whatsoever (Fibre, iWork, Final Cut, etc).

That is a TOTAL ripoff. Really beyond the expensive mobo and CPUs, everything else is average to crap, and they want almost 7 grand for it, without even a basic display, ssd, anything. Config it with a couple average things like an SSD, 24GB of ram, and a monitor, and you're looking at 10k. Who buys this shit?

I haven't checked recently, but from what I remember Dell Workstations are expensive too. Not as much as a Mac Pro, but still up there.

 

[Arkaign]

I haven't checked recently, but from what I remember Dell Workstations are expensive too. Not as much as a Mac Pro, but still up there.

True, and you'd end up with a lot of the same limitations (no OC, limited PSU/GPU, etc).

 

[Ninjahedge]

That is why, when you are dealing with that much hardware, you do a bit of research and build it yourself.

When looking for the $500 desktop, you don't save much by putting it together yourself, but once you break about $2K? the numbers start growing.

I can see where you could save a few thou on a $10K Dell Ubersystem/$12K Apple OMGWTFBBQ system.

 

[Acanthus]

I haven't checked recently, but from what I remember Dell Workstations are expensive too. Not as much as a Mac Pro, but still up there.

Dell is probably not the best example, considering they are bleeding marketshare like a stuck pig over the last couple of years. No one is buying Dells

 

[WelshBloke]

Dell is probably not the best example, considering they are bleeding marketshare like a stuck pig over the last couple of years. No one is buying Dells

I bet its still higher than Apples though.

 

[Arkaign]

I bet its still higher than Apples though.

In marketshare of notebooks/desktops/netbooks, Dell is probably at least 20:1 over Apple.

In terms of profitability/itunes/iphones/apps/etc, Apple is definitely far over Dell though.

Dell is trying to pull an IBM now and get away from relying so heavily on hardware for profits, I am hearing lots of 'Dell Services' ads a la IBM managed solutions / enterprise consulting.

 

[Arkaign]

That is why, when you are dealing with that much hardware, you do a bit of research and build it yourself.

When looking for the $500 desktop, you don't save much by putting it together yourself, but once you break about $2K? the numbers start growing.

I can see where you could save a few thou on a $10K Dell Ubersystem/$12K Apple OMGWTFBBQ system.

Oh hell yeah, for $5k you could build a system that would make that $6.5k Mac Pro look like a trash bin.

 

[WelshBloke]

In marketshare of notebooks/desktops/netbooks, Dell is probably at least 20:1 over Apple.

Its about 3:1 I think.

And I was talking purely about market share, as Acanthus was saying no one was buying Dells.

 

[Arkaign]

Its about 3:1 I think.

And I was talking purely about market share, as Acanthus was saying no one was buying Dells.

Apple claims 3.36m Macs sold (desktop/notebook/etc, excluding ipad/iphone/ipod) in 2009

Global PC sales 2009 = 305.9m units

Dell Market share average for past 5 years for PCs (Desktops/Notebooks/Netbooks/Servers) = 11.5-15.9% (trending lower) = between 35 and 48.6m units sold yearly.

Perhaps with the notably higher cost per unit of Macs vs. Dells, and the lower overseas success to boot, Apples sales $ is a bit higher than their volume share indicates.

In any case, Dell sells about 10-15x more units annually than Apple, which lines up perfectly with what I see in corporate and home environments. For every 10-20 Dells I see, I see a Mac of some sort. Dropping all PCs into the mix, I see maybe a Mac for every 50 PCs.

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

(4) I just installed an optical drive PSU 450w for my second card, cost me $20

(7) USB 3.0 works fine in Mac Pro, you just need a PCIe card, for about $35

(8) You can buy (and I have) a blu ray drive for your mac.

:awe: It Just Works :awe: *





* If you buy all the shit you need to make it work.

 

[cheezy321]

:awe: It Just Works :awe: *





* If you buy all the shit you need to make it work.

** Just like every PC or Mac on the market. Or are you saying that every PC laptop that comes out now has USB 3.0 and a blu ray drive?? Whats your point?

 

[Arkaign]

** Just like every PC or Mac on the market. Or are you saying that every PC laptop that comes out now has USB 3.0 and a blu ray drive?? Whats your point?

We weren't talking about notebooks, it was comparing the $6.5k Mac Pro I specced up there. Even so, there are now more than a few PC notebooks under $500, and loads below $600, that include a BD-Read/DVD-Writer. BluRay, USB3, video cards above a single 5870 or dual 5770, lots of other things aren't even options on the site, which means dealing with aftermarket products. Not to mention why on earth did they make Displayport? If you have a big HDMI-ready TV or large high-quality DVI monitor, you have to get an adapter. Bleh.

The Dell equivelent to the Mac Pro, the Precision T7500, includes goodies like SAS Raid ready, USB3, etc, which are extra on the Mac. Of course, you do have to select the BD drive as an option (not an option on the Apple Mac Pro config page, though it's probably cake to install after the fact, not sure about playback software though).

 

[cheezy321]

We weren't talking about notebooks, it was comparing the $6.5k Mac Pro I specced up there. Even so, there are now more than a few PC notebooks under $500, and loads below $600, that include a BD-Read/DVD-Writer. BluRay, USB3, video cards above a single 5870 or dual 5770, lots of other things aren't even options on the site, which means dealing with aftermarket products. Not to mention why on earth did they make Displayport? If you have a big HDMI-ready TV or large high-quality DVI monitor, you have to get an adapter. Bleh.

The Dell equivelent to the Mac Pro, the Precision T7500, includes goodies like SAS Raid ready, USB3, etc, which are extra on the Mac. Of course, you do have to select the BD drive as an option (not an option on the Apple Mac Pro config page, though it's probably cake to install after the fact, not sure about playback software though).

my bad, i'll retreat slowly now...

 

[Fenixgoon]

It's not the same hardware, it's the same components but a different motherboard running an EFI rather than a BIOS

actually EFI is layered on top of BIOS, IIRC. i read an article a while back debunking this. i'll try and dig it up.