The PC Weenies » Mac Pro

More RAM!

Krishna — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 01:37:39 +0000

It’s the holiday season – and I wanted to give my Mac Pro a gift for its dedicated service for the past 3 years. So last week, I ordered 2x2GB memory sticks from site sponsor Other World Computing. This brings the total memory of my system up to 14GB.

The reason for this upgrade?

My computer had a tendency to exhaust all its available RAM (thanks to the myriad of graphics programs I run concurrently on my system) to the point where the OS began using virtual RAM (aka my solid state drive’s limited space) to compensate.

The extra 4GB of RAM should alleviate that issue. The OWC RAM came within a few days and installation was as simple as snapping the extra modules into one of the memory riser cards. All 14GB were recognized when I powered the Mac Pro on.

With memory prices so incredibly cheap, adding more RAM seems to be a no-brainer of an upgrade.

-Krishna
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A Rebuttal to Ben Brooks: the Mac Pro Experience

Krishna — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 21:06:44 +0000

Ben Brooks weighed in on the Mac Pro in his most recent blog post, and why it is a very “un-Mac-like experience for end users”.

He makes some excellent points on The Mac Experience. There’s no denying that Apple is focusing on the consumer market heavily these days. Pro users seem to be an after thought, as it represents a “niche” market.

While I largely agree with his article on Apple’s direction with the Mac, I have to take rebuttal to his assertion that Mac Pro is a noisy machine.

In his words:

I never could play video games on it, because the sound drowned out the TV in the next room — with the door closed.

Maybe his Mac Pro was noisy, but in practically every Mac Pro I’ve worked on (both at work and at home), it’s always run silent.

To be fair: Earlier Macs, particularly the PowerMac G5 models, were notorious for fan noise. But in my experience, the Mac Pro is just as quiet as an iMac.

Despite their lackluster sales, I strongly believe that there is a market for the Mac Pro. I can site numerous creative professionals and developers who continue to rely on these work beasts for heavy lifting.

There are three big advantages with the Mac Pro in the Apple line-up, as I see it. They are:

It’s expandable
It’s powerful
It’s flexible

I still use my early 2008 Mac Pro, and see no need to upgrade. This machine is still just as fast as it was when it was new, which is possibly the main reason why Apple may not like having the Mac Pro in its line-up.

The Mac Pro’s flexibility is absolutely important to me. I can connect any DVI display to my Mac Pro – and I’m not limited to Apple’s uber-glossy Cinema Display. (Aside: I despise Apple’s decision to stick with the glossy display. The reflectivity, even in a dark room, is noticeable to the point of distraction.)

That being said, what I would really like to see from Apple is a smaller “mini-tower” configuration of the Mac Pro. My dream Mac Pro would include the following:

two full PCI slots
2 Thunderbolt, 6 USB3 and 2 Firewire800 ports
four drive bays

Like Ben, I don’t think Apple will discontinue the Mac Pro anytime soon. There is a market for the machine, and those who need its capabilities and power will not settle for anything else.

-Krishna
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Preparing the Mac Pro for Radeon Power

Krishna — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 03:44:23 +0000

After reading my post “Does a 1GB Graphics Card Make Sense for a Non-Gamer”, a very generous reader sent me an ATI Radeon 4870 1GB card to see for myself. (Thank you, Sam!) The card arrived yesterday.

This is an XFX model card that works out of the box with the PC. My goal is to flash the card to work inside a Mac Pro. From my research into the subject, I know it’s possible. Despite some reservations on whether or not I’ll be successful, I’m eager to document and share the process with you guys. Right now, I’m waiting to receive two Molex power supply adapters to power the card. Once that comes in, I’ll roll up my sleeves and dive in.

Oh, and if you’ve ever performed such an operation, please feel free to share any success / war stories or links to comprehensive step-by-step guides. I haven’t performed this type of operation before, outside of flashing a few EEPROM and PALs back in my EE days. (And that was almost 20 years ago…)

I’d also be very grateful for any potential “gotchas” I should look out for. Thanks!

-Krishna
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The Solid State Drive Experience: First Impressions of the OWC Extreme Pro SSD

Krishna — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 15:26:08 +0000

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the bees-knees in computing, at least from all the tech reviews I’ve read. SSDs promise the holy valhalla of computing: super fast boot-up times, instant application launches, and increased durability due to no moving parts. In short, everything a traditional hard drive should be.

The downside to these drives has been its higher GB/$ cost when compared with conventional hard drives. Slowly but surely, as production and adoption of these drives increase, the price points will go down (just like everything else in technology). More than a little piqued by the phenomenon of SSD drives, I decided to buy one. The unit I purchased was the 40GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD, from my site sponsor Other World Computing. I spent roughly $120US total for both the 40GB OWC Extreme Pro SSD and Icy Dock.

Installation

I placed the order last Monday, and the goods arrived on Saturday. Along with the SSD drive, I purchased an Icy Dock 2.5″ to 3.5″ converter. The Icy Dock lets 2.5″ drives interface with 3.5″ SATA ports. It’s made of durable plastic and perfectly housed OWC SSD within it. Installation within the Mac Pro involved mounting the Icy Dock to one of the Mac Pro’s built-in drive sleds. Four screws later and the OWC SSD was inside the machine. Installation was literally a snap. I only encountered one minor snag – and that was initially lining up the drive sleds with the Mac Pro.

The OWC SSD unit I purchased was 40GB in size. While this size is paltry for all the data I work with, my intention was to use the OWC SSD drive for speeding up boot times and application launches. After reformatting the drive using Disk Utility, I performed a clean installation of Snow Leopard and all my main applications. This left me with 11GB to spare on the SSD. I opted to leave my data (all 400GB of it) where it was at, on my internal SATA hard drive.

How Fast is It

While I haven’t made any quantitative measurements, I will say that this drive is a significant improvement over the conventional hard disk drive. Boot time after installing my applications and utilities was under 30 seconds – compared to the usual minute and a half. Application launches, especially for heavy apps like Photoshop and Maya, took place at a fraction of the time they normally would via HDD.

I’m not really going out on a limb by saying that SSDs are the future of computing storage. I can imagine that in the next three years, SSDs will be the standard on all machines. My first impressions with the OWC SSD can be summed up in two words: insanely fast.

If you yearn for faster performance and have the money to spend, adding an OWC SSD is a fantastic upgrade for your machine. It’ll literally make you feel like you have a new computer again. Now that I have had a chance to own and use one in my Mac Pro, I have seen the light.

Quantitative results will happen soon. Questions? Hit me up on the comments below.

-Krishna

P.S. The ApplePress has an informative review of the 120GB OWC Extreme Pro SSD.

Shameless plug: My book, PC Weenies Rebootus Maximus, is now on sale!
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Feeling the Itch (SSD drives)

Krishna — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 01:03:32 +0000

I’ve been lusting after SSD drives for a few months now. The performance and durability of these drives are the tempting factors. What’s holding me back is primarily the cost (and the lack of TRIM tools for Mac OS X). The dollar / megabyte ratio is still pretty high compared to the standard hard drive.

If I owned one, I would use an SSD drive as my boot drive on my Mac Pro. This drive would also house all the applications I use on a regular basis. My plan would still include using platter-based 7200RPM drives as a scratch disk / data drive.

I’m looking for your input on SSD drives. Do you have one? Are you planning to get one soon, or do you plan on waiting? If you’re have one / own one, which model do you recommend? Any drawbacks? Are TRIM tools necessary for “self-healing” drives? Should I wait? Any word on the new low cost Intel 40GB “value” SSD drives? Do SSD drives get fragmented? Will defragmentation utilities work well with them?

I’m looking for more data points from other readers. Let me know in the comments below.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

Photos of my newly revamped studio

Krishna — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 21:52:05 +0000

I reorganized my studio this afternoon. I took some time to vacuum the carpet in all those hard to reach areas where wires usually hide.

The maple desk carries a 20″ Cinema Display with PowerMac Dual 2GHz G5. The wood laminate desk houses a dual display setup, with a 30″ Samsung and 19″ HannsG being driven by a Mac Pro (2.8GHz octo-core).

From an ergonomic standpoint, I feel like I did the right thing. My keyboard is now at a comfortable height. I also brought my MacPro up on the desk.

I was also able to clean and eliminate some unnecessary hardware and cabling. The hutch houses all my external drives. I’m feeling productive already!

Without further ado, the photos:

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

Windows 7: My First Impressions

Krishna — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:15:00 +0000

I never expected to like Windows 7 as much as I did.

But I did.

A lot.

Windows 7 has changed my impression about Windows. Not only does it *look* good, it runs good. Installation was surprisingly easy and very straight forward. Imagine that?

I used Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant software to perform the install. Installation took about 20 minutes and involved 2 reboots (One for the install, one for the updates).

I purchased the Home Premium upgrade package, having owned Windows Vista Ultimate, and performed a clean install to a new hard drive partition. I was prompted to enter my Windows 7 serial number and authentication ran without a hitch. Windows 7 also automatically picked up my wireless network.

Printer and scanner drivers were found quickly and installed without incident. What are my first impressions from moving around Windows 7? The OS not only looks fantastic, it’s *gasp!* actually very fast and usable. My video card is an older ATI 2600XT 256MB and window performance was very snappy.

The OS feels cohesive – much more so than Windows Vista. The fit and finish of Windows 7 is absolutely solid and is a testament to the MS engineers who worked on it. There are minor niggles I’ve encountered – such as the lack of a keyboard shortcut to eject discs, or the fact that audio does not work yet (I’m assuming its because Apple’s Boot Camp drivers have yet to be updated to work with Windows 7). But that’s about the biggest “gotcha” I was able to find so far.

According to Steve Ballmer, 8 million people beta-tested Windows 7 during its gestational period. It really does show with this release and the engineers behind it deserve to be recognized for their efforts.

Windows 7 makes me more curious about the platform. I actually want to start using it on a regular basis. I’m planning to install my primary apps (Maya, Photoshop, Painter) over the next few days to further evaluate the OS during day-to-day use.

Do I like Windows 7 more than Snow Leopard? It’s still too early to tell. My first impressions of Windows 7 are very positive, about the same as it was for Snow Leopard. On the same hardware, a 2008 Mac Pro model, Windows 7 *feels* faster and snappier than Snow Leopard. A true comparison can only take place once I’ve had a chance to run my main apps on Windows 7.

This release, in my opinion, brings Windows (finally) on par with Apple’s Mac OS X.

Should you upgrade to Windows 7 from an older version of Windows? That’s your call. I’m glad I did.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

ATI Radeon 2600 swapped

Krishna — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 01:50:49 +0000

Because I’m a nerd, I took some photos of replacing the video card on my Mac Pro. The weird picture problems are still there, and I’ve isolated the problem to my Samsung display. Right now I’m waiting for a replacement to be shipped from Samsung (hopefully within a week).

I was really impressed with how fast Apple sent the replacement card over. I called AppleCare Sunday morning, and by Tuesday morning, I had the card at my doorstep. Say what you will about Apple, but I was really impressed with their service.

Samsung’s customer service was good as well. The lady I spoke with was polite and understood the issue (read: didn’t treat me like an idiot when I explained what was happening). Here’s hoping the new monitor comes soon. (Kudos to both companies for having customer service available on a Sunday morning. I didn’t expect that to be the case when I called…)

Here’s the replacement card:

…here it is installed:

…and another snapshot of the really weird video artifacts I’m still seeing.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

A follow-up to the Mac Pro video artifacts problem…

Krishna — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:40:29 +0000

Yesterday I posted about the weird video artifacts I was seeing on my display.

On a hunch, I opened the case of my Mac Pro yesterday afternoon. Sure enough, dust was everywhere inside the case, especially on the video card. I gave a few blasts of compressed air to the video card (and surroundings) to clear the dust out. I powered up my Mac. The video artifacts that had plagued my system before were no longer there.

Flash forward 12 hours later, and my machine is still behaving. It would seem that the video problems have gone away. An article on Macworld seemed to confirm the experience.

Moral of the story: I need to clean the inside of the Mac more often.

-KrishnaSimilar Posts:

Video Artifacts on Mac Pro?

Krishna — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:03:18 +0000

I think my video card may be melting down (or something). This morning I noticed a lot of strange video artifacts on my Mac Pro. It’s running an ATI 2600 card. Up until today, there weren’t any problems. Curious to know if other folks have experienced these video issues.

Thanks!

-KrishnaSimilar Posts: