Mac Pro questions

king awesome

Ok. So does anyone own a Mac Pro that they use on a daily basis?

Currently I have a Mac laptop I use for work and then I have a PC I built myself that I use for gaming and any random stuff.

What I'm envisioning is a Mac Pro that will sit in my office with 2-3 monitors hooked up to it. Anything I need to do I can do on that thing. I can have multiple VM's running, multiple IDE's open, photoshop and illustrator open, switching between doing 50 different things and it can handle it.

I just want to hear from some people who have them or use them if it's worth the $$$? If I get one is it really going to last me 5+ years like they say?

Also:
- Is it possible with the power of these things to do all my gaming in a VM? Or would I still need to boot camp?
- Are there any caveats or weird gotchas with the hardware and trying to use windows for gaming on it?

Dehumanized

VMWare Fusion and Parallels can support running games in VMs, but there is some overhead involved in doing that instead of running in a dual booted environment.

This whitepaper mentions a potential GPU overhead of 2 to 120 times, but it's for VMWare Fusion 2, which is the older version of the software (http://www.usenix.org/event/wiov08/tech/full_papers/dowty/dowty_html/).

This video shows someone virtualizing things. Unfortunately his capture software is making thing look choppier than it actually is in the VM. He makes some claims that are completely false (Bioshock incompatible with Windows 7?), but it's hard to say whether it's because they are just incompatible with running in a VM, or if it's a case of PEBKAC.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmMLrpuyWac

useless4

I have two Mac Pros :

• Original Flavor : 2 x 2ghz dual core with esata (21TB total storage running inside and outside via sata/esata)
• Second Generation: 2 x 2.8ghz four core with 10gb of RAM and ATI 5770 1gb RAM video card

To crush your dreams first, unless someone knows something I don't know : VMs are limited to emulated graphic cards of 256 meg (I use Parallels 6) so gaming is far from ideal. I would bootcamp gaming if I was into it. After I put the ATI card in the second mac I did that windows capability test thing and it came out as a 7.2 out of 7.9 and most of that was because of my Western Digital Green Drive slowing things down.

As for everything else : Yes. If you have the right setup you can do everything else you talk about without breaking a sweat .

I often have Windows 7 open in a VM, Logic going recording and playing back songs, browsers open, code compiling and videos crunching all at once.

It feels so sturdy that I haven't once thought about upgrading. The only reason I got the new video card is mine was starting to act funky after all these years and I liked the idea of three monitors.

ROFISH

I have an original flavor (2006) with a 5770 and 10GB of RAM and an SSD. It rocks pretty hard considering the money. Got the base 2006 machine cheap, put a little bit of money towards upgrades.

I do Boot Camp for games, mostly because I'm lazy. (Although all the games I play have Mac versions that are fully usable like L4D, TF2 and SC2. I still reboot. :P)

Actually, now that you mention it, my machine's almost five years old and still kicking strong. It's 99% because I can upgrade the video card no problem.

Brodo Faggins

Source games run on OS X, but I don't know why they even bothered. Apple uses some severely outdated software when it comes to running games. See how Portal fared when it first launched on the Mac. You're better off making a Boot Camp partition.

Tetsugen

As cliche as this sounds, getting the Mac Pro was probably life changing in terms of my career. I've literally done week long video renderings for work and it hasn't been turned off for about 2 years. Mine's finally starting to struggle now only because my office got flooded with water. In my opinion it's worth the price, but if you are getting one wait for the Sandy Bridge version coming next month.

king awesome

Tetsugen wrote: »

As cliche as this sounds, getting the Mac Pro was probably life changing in terms of my career. I've literally done week long video renderings for work and it hasn't been turned off for about 2 years. Mine's finally starting to struggle now only because my office got flooded with water. In my opinion it's worth the price, but if you are getting one wait for the Sandy Bridge version coming next month.

Thanks for the advice. I wont' be picking up one for the next few months anyway, so the timing works out.

But god damnit guys, I was hoping for someone to say "nah, it's overkill you dont' need it" but you are all jackasses :P

useless4

Think about all the money you will save by not having to buy new computers.

People use pro Macs even after Apple gives up on them - look how many G5s are floating around and they are way beyond supported.

I am about to give my dad my first gen knowing it has years left in it to replace his first gen mac mini which is end of lifed due to the 32bit chip.

Falken

Brodo Faggins wrote: »

Source games run on OS X, but I don't know why they even bothered. Apple uses some severely outdated software when it comes to running games. See how Portal fared when it first launched on the Mac. You're better off making a Boot Camp partition.

What severely outdated software?


The problem with source games having ass performance on osx is that they're using JIT to translate from direct X to openGL in real time, causing just a tiny bit of overhead.

It was hilarious reading the steam forum thread where one of valve's code monkeys desperately tried to claim it wasn't an emulator, because it was in the same binary as the game itself.