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Mac Pro

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Re: Mac Pro

#491

Post by morsch »

anthonyb wrote: post #317
morsch wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The air being heated naturally flows upwards, so blowing downwards in such a design is a very bad idea. Ideally (and for it to be truly a relevant design), the whole thing is silent at the very least while idle, using very little if any fan and relying on convection to do most of the cooling.

So how many cubic feet per minute will convection cause in this case? 1? 10? Fans will move a hundred cfm or more without much noise. Both of my recent hardware failures have been caused by dust accumulating in heatsinks, so having something which contributes to that is also a "very bad idea". Especially since the air passes through a relatively confined space which you can't regularly clear out.

What constitutes much noise is subjective, I suppose, but any fan moving hundreds of cfm will be very loud. A 140mm fan moving 20 to 30 cfm is still audible, if you're in a quiet room.

A common approach is to have an intake filter that catches dust. Another is to elevate the case a few inches above the ground.

Re: Mac Pro

#492

Post by fanf2 »

kenkam wrote: post #136
glenra wrote: post #70

"Okay, we COULD just label the ports with regular high color contrast paint. Say, white paint on a black background or black paint on a white background. But that would be TOO EASY and the panel would then really 'pop' against our otherwise monolithic clean design. Which would be distracting." "But during actual use the ports are going to be on the BACK of the device (so you won't see it) and will have random stuff p…

Playing the devil's advocate here: Black on black is pretty funky, but it might make sense to have LED lights. When you plug stuff into its expansion ports, chances are you're gonna move the machine slightly, so it lights up automagically which lets you see where things are. You may also put this inside a cabinet or under the desk maybe (I'd put it on a mantlepiece) where light isn't abundant. Shake it, ah, there it…

It's the weird colour scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it. Hey, what is this, some kind of galactic hyper-hearse? (Zaphod Beeblebrox)

Re: Mac Pro

#493

Post by Cthulhu_ »

seanp2k2 wrote: post #448
darkarmani wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't make the proper port glow when you get the cable close to it?

My Dell U2410 has buttons that detect when your finger gets near them (they start lighting up) which is pretty slick. Maybe it's just a bit more expensive / harder to integrate and wasn't considered worth it. Not exactly sure how it works but I think it uses the same physical phenomenon as a theremin. Again it's mostly pointless, but it is pretty slick.

> Maybe it's just a bit more expensive / harder to integrate

And probably patent-protected by Dell and needing licensing cost, instead of coming up with something they could patent themselves.

Re: Mac Pro

#494

Post by wisty »

digitalengineer wrote: post #435
wisty wrote: post #417

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro. As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, s…

How about the entire graphic design industry? Finally a 'headless iMac' with balls. The MacPro allows me to attach my EIZO monitors. The iMac screens are consumer-quality, really. If you're looking for high quality screens (and OSX), the MacPro is the best. I am curious about the price-range.

I'm guessing it will start somewhere between $2,500 to $3,500. It will be probably more than the top-end iMac. I can't see it being a lot more expensive than the current low-end Mac Pro.

It would be nice if they had a less expensive version, but this is Apple we're talking about.

Re: Mac Pro

#495

Post by geon »

wisty wrote: post #417

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro. As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, s…

The Mac Mini is the low-end, cheapest mac. I see nothing low end, nor cheap about this one.

The small form factor just means there is less air inside than in your typical ATX tower. I really don't see your connection to Mac Mini.

Re: Mac Pro

#496

Post by geon »

koralatov wrote: post #483
ChuckMcM wrote: post #144

As a design asthetic I find it fairly interesting. By working toward a design managing the thermals in a way that allow for more heat removal while allowing it to not sound like a 747 on takeoff is good. I suspect your typical desktop machine will benefit from that kind of thinking. Also for a long time Intel was trying to push all of the expansion boards outside the case with USB, and Apple seems close to achieving…

In the ways the heat management is designed, it reminds me of the oft-maligned G4 Cube, which used the same components around the edges, airflow through the centre idea to cool the machine. The small size of the unit also reinforces the similarity for me.

Didn't the Cube have overheating issues?

Re: Mac Pro

#497

Post by wisty »

look_lookatme wrote: post #419
wisty wrote: post #417

OK, so it's not a Mac Pro. It's a Mac Mini Pro. As long as it's not too expensive, it's exactly what a lot of prosumers might want (especially those who want to ditch their laptops for iPads and iPhones, and maybe a MBA for the road- a lot of people's MacBook Pros live on their desks). I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations (and at some point, s…

"I can't see a serious video editor wanting one, but they're all jumping ship to get cheaper Wintel workstations" Is this actually the case? I don't know anything about that segment of the computing industry, but I just assumed that FCP was the industry standard.

While it's nice to have a great machine for editing photos, or writing software, it's more a "nice to have". As long as you don't run out of RAM, most of the time you aren't limited by CPU speed. And a lot of those tasks tend to be harder to parallelise, so having 12+ cores isn't a huge deal. Video editing is much more likely to be limited by CPU, and it parallelises nicely, so a better machine saves tonnes of time.

Have a look at the current options Apple is putting out. If you need something that's cheaper than what Apple puts out, or something that's bleeding edge, then you're out of luck. This is especially true with video cards.

Apple used to offer the best value workstations on the market. They got lazy, or maybe the Chinese / Taiwanese started undercutting IBM, Dell, and HP; which forced prices down to a point where Apple wasn't interested.

And Apple doesn't have a very predictable upgrade cycle. If you're spending $5,000 on a machine, only to see the next version come out a few months later, it's not going to be very fun. Nor is holding off upgrades, because you just don't know if a new model is around the corner.

Video requires a heap of grunt. Apple wasn't offering machines with enough grunt, or cheap enough machines. They looked at the cost of switching, vs the cost of sticking with Apple, and a lot decided to switch.

Re: Mac Pro

#498

Post by kayoone »

rsync wrote: post #256

I love this new device. I suspect I will buy one. But it doesn't solve my "need a new mac pro" problem. Right now my 2009 octo mac pro, with six displays attached, plays three roles: - it is my high end desktop workstation, with three primary high resolution (2560x1600) displays. - it is my HTPC, with one of the six monitors strung into another room entirely. - it is my office NAS, with four internal 3TB disks So, th…

care to elaborate why you have all of this in one device? My guess is that having 3 seperate devices (a workstation, a NAS and a small HTPC) makes more sense for encapsulation and failure scenarios. However, if the workstation runs 24/7 anyway it might make sense as the uptime of the NAS/HTPC probably isnt very critical if you mess something up on the Workstation and have to reboot or something.

Also like to know what you use 6(!) displays for :) What do you work on ?

Re: Mac Pro

#499

Post by Sammi »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #430
comex wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PCIe 4.0 x4 would be ~8 GB/s That's what I said, 64 Gbps. :)

Oh wow, yeah... didn't realize it was 20 Gbits/s for TB2 and not GB. It's not even close to as fast as currently shipping PCIe 3.0 x16, at 2.5 GB/s versus PCIe's 16. I guess external video cards are not really much of an option. Even using up all six TB2 ports won't get you as much bandwidth as a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.

Notice that Thunderbolt 1/2 are full duplex. With Thunderbolt 2 you get an independent 20 Gbit/s channel in each direction.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7049/intel-thunderbolt-2-every...

Re: Mac Pro

#500

Post by rednukleus »

brusch wrote: post #429
rednukleus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume he is referring to the strange decision to make the thing so small (and beautiful) at the expense of any internal expandability. So professionals are going to have all sorts of hard drives and external graphics cards and optical drives etc hanging off this thing.

sorry if I am barking up the wrong tree.. but do you think it will be beautiful with all the breakout cables ? For me this whole thing looks like a blast from the past - my trusty C64 with everything outside the box (and there were some articles in the 64er magazine [german magazine] which showed how to build everything into a single case for the neat, "integrated" look)

I think for many people it will be a beautiful black cylinder on a cluttered desktop. For people who need to use expansions this will take up a significantly larger footprint than a machine that allows for internal expansion.

For those that put the machine under their desk it will just be a mess of cables and things to kick over.

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