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Mac Pro questions
king awesome
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
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 $$$? If I get one is it really going to last me 5+ years like they say?
Also:
- Is it possible with the power of these things to do all my gaming in a VM? Or would I still need to boot camp?
- Are there any caveats or weird gotchas with the hardware and trying to use windows for gaming on it?
Currently I have a Mac laptop I use for work and then I have a PC I built myself that I use for gaming and any random stuff.
What I'm envisioning is a Mac Pro that will sit in my office with 2-3 monitors hooked up to it. Anything I need to do I can do on that thing. I can have multiple VM's running, multiple IDE's open, photoshop and illustrator open, switching between doing 50 different things and it can handle it.
I just want to hear from some people who have them or use them if it's worth the $$$? 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?
Bigsushi.fm
Listen to our podcast, read our articles, tell us how much you hate it and how to make it better
Listen to our podcast, read our articles, tell us how much you hate it and how to make it better
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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
- 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.
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.
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
Listen to our podcast, read our articles, tell us how much you hate it and how to make it better
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.
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.