Mac Pro questions.

[Syous]

So I'm wanting to buy a Mac Pro, and have a few questions.

Can I buy the Mac Pro and upgrade the video card easily?

Also, can I buy the hardware that a Mac Pro uses and assemble it myself (an attempt to save money) or is the hardware exclusive to Mac?

I know you can upgrade RAM, and I know that a Mac Pro can use an NVidia 8800, but I guess what I'm asking is the 8800 a specific Mac piece of hardware or just your typical 8800?

Thanks.

[Stratification]

Video card, memory and hard drives are all easily upgradeable. I think that the video cards may need to be Mac specific, but I've seen talk here and there of flashing cards to make them compatible, not sure on that. You can't really assemble it yourself though, Apple likes to keep control of that part. You can (sort of) build your own machine and install OS X, but it's completely unsupported, and getting drivers and doing updates will probably be a huge pain. Not to mention it's against the Terms of Service for OS X.

[Syous]

Ya I've got the OS working on my own machine, and would like to get it legal w/o actually paying 3grand for a mac pro.

I've tried looking for the parts that the mac pro uses but it's difficult finding the real motherboard and what not.

[fasterthanlight™]

Thats because its a mac pro-specific motherboard, as are most of the components in a mac pro (how do you think they fit everything in there all neat and tidy-like?)

Also, I'm pretty sure the mac pro can support multiple video cards (potentially supporting up to 8 30" cinema displays... i think), whether its restricted to the 8800, i'm not sure


the mac pro is a worthwhile purchase, purely because its so easy to upgrade (that is the whole philosophy)




heh, the mac pro I would buy is at $7,000 ..... yikes

[fasterthanlight™]

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=264928

[grimdeath]

the mac pro is a worthwhile purchase, purely because its so easy to upgrade (that is the whole philosophy)




heh, the mac pro I would buy is at $7,000 ..... yikes

Yeah its as simple as getting rid of your old Mac and buying a new one :lol:

[fasterthanlight™]

selling my imac would get me 1/4 of the way there lol

[Syous]

I've looked up prices on tigerdirect, and the motherboard / two Intel Xeon processors would costs almost 1.5k alone.

Yikes.

[fasterthanlight™]

hahahha ya, easily the most expensive component on any computer

[Templarian]

Yep and to have two of them just makes it grossly expensive. Try to tack on 2 high end video cards also and see the price jump.

[fasterthanlight™]

then, all of a sudden you're rivalling the price of the actual mac pro, not even counting the man hours and labour you put into making it

[Templarian]

^Man hours to make it I think those get dwarfed by the actual price. :lol:

plus putting something of that magnitude together would be a joyous experience not actual work

[fasterthanlight™]

Until you break it ........

[Syous]

Actually getting the all the stuff from tiger direct to build the PC equivalent was around 2500, tack on a second video card for SLI support and go above 2 gigs of ram and you can get pretty close to 3k which is what the mac pro was.

[fasterthanlight™]

and it wouldn't look so damn pretty

[snickelfritz]

You can build a PC that is fairly close to the Mac Pro in terms of performance, but you sacrifice the nice drive sleds and other Apple design features, and overall quality.
The difference in cost is minor; the difference in quality is significant.

[fasterthanlight™]

apple warranties rock, also

[grimdeath]

apple warranties rock, also

Their Customer Support sux monkey teets though :lol:

[DanontheMoon]

I miss my Mac Pro at NASA. (I know that ONE of y'all is reading this, NASA! Gimme my job back!)

[Templarian]

Tech support can only hope to be as good as Dell's. "So you threw it off a building well send a tech out with the parts... so the tech will have a screen kit a case kit a motherboard and a hardrive kit. is there anything else you need?"... "Nope that will be good"... "What was the color of your case again..."... "I found a peice of red so red". "Okay".

[fasterthanlight™]

Apple's tech is very limited, in that, all they can offer you is the same information you could get from looking on the internet for a bit, and they also lack any imagination, theres no ingenuity with those guys.

HOWEVER

the GeniusBar is a completely different story.

Those geniuses are the friendliest, most helpful tech people EVER...... EVER

[SlowRoasted]

I have an 08' Mac Pro (8-core, 8x1gig mem sticks, 8800GT). I thought about building a PC version to save money, but I'm happy with my decision to go with a Mac. I wouldn't have saved a huge amount of money, and I'm sure I would have ran into those typical "build-it-yourself headaches." Instead, I got a dead-silent 8-core monster that looks amazing and works right out of the box. What turned me off is all the customer reviews on the Tyan and other dual-quad mobos on Newegg. A lot of them were complaining about bad bios, drivers, etc and I didn't feel like dealing with that.

As far as video cards go, I think some manufacturers are using that new type of Bios, which Macs require and is optional in Vista. I think as all the manufacturers move to the new stuff, it will be easier to just buy a third part video card and plug it in your Mac Pro. Don't quote me on that, it's just what I got from researching a few months ago.

Edit:

This is the new Bios I was talking about - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Firmware_Interface