XYMer's Home away from Home

Yay! Apple FINALLY announced new Mac Pros!

The CPUs actually are an improvement for a change, and the GPU appears to be based on the Sapphire Tech designs, hopefully (if we're REALLY lucky) the VAPOR-X cards. I'm dying to see if the 5870 is available separately once the Mac Pros come out, and if so, do they use two 6 pin connectors or a 6/8 or 8/8.

My only complaint: This comes out in August, right at the same time the new upcoming Yamaha RX-V3067 is coming out, which I so desparately need in order to replace my aging and non-HDMI equipped HTR-5860.

I'd upload the PDF for the 3067 but um, stupid max filesize is 768K.

Anywho, NEW MAC PROS! NEW VIDEO CARDS!! YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY!!!

Zip? 7Zip? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Sucks that I see no mention of ATI Eye Infinity which these cards support; its a great feature for 3 monitor gaming.
I just wish they had a sub $1500 macpro (like the old powermac days). I just cant justify spending $3k-$5k on a computer anymore.
One thing that also surprised me is that they are usb 2.0; usb 3.0 will be everywhere by this fall. Shame.

meh. This is just a processor and video card upgrade. Has anything else changed? These are things they could have added as options months ago.

The file's >768K when zipped.

Apple isn't going to bother with USB3.0 until Intel starts actively shipping it on most, if not all of their mobos. Doesn't matter that everybody else and their mum is shipping it now, Apple just has to wait for Intel. The one reason I can see for that is because Apple's mobo designs are based on Intel mobo designs, and since Apple is a hardware nazi regime (this so far has been mostly a good thing other than the costs involved for the consumer).

What I'm surprised is not showing up is at least one SATAIII/6Gbps connection and/or eSATA. I mean, seriously, FW800? That's like 10 years old. eSATA is a far FAR faster interface, and if it's a port multiplier version, far more flexible at that.

Indeed. This update is pretty much a let down. The six core processors were announced back in March with volume shipments arriving in May. The updated Mac Pro's are shipping in August, 3 months behind general availability.

The graphics card options are even worse. The Radeon 5870 was released in September of 2009 and the 5770 a month later. It is nice that Apple is finally using a decent video card as standard but this is something they could have upgraded nearly a year ago.

Also worth pointing out that the Radeon 5870 is a custom Apple design with two mini-DP and a single dual link DVI connector. I don't know of any PC card with this configuration. I was kinda expecting Apple to use the six mini-DP variant with 2 GB of memory.

There is no nVidia graphics card options at all in the new line up.



USB 3.0 is the future for consumer IO. High end PC systems are shipping with it right now and it is kinda odd that Apple did not adopt it. Similarly PC's are shipping with 6 Gbit SATA ports. Faster Firewire would have been nice but Firewire is still a niche.

All this additional connectivity could have been provided had Apple integrated another chipset on the motherboard. The Xeon chips support two QPI interfaces. In a single socket system, they can both be used for IO and on a dual socket system, one is for IO and the other for coherency with the other socket.

mac towers are such niche systems nowadays. the only exposure i have to them are scientists at work using them for matlab number crunching. i don't know anyone who has a mac tower for their own use at home. the life of mac towers is real long though, so people really do get their money's worth over the long haul

*cough* *cough* *cough* *cough*

USB. 3 is not there so in a year and a half from now Apple will have something to offer in an upgrade

They still aren't up in the bloody store. I want to see some pricing, dammit!

That being said, at least Apple's not putting low-end crapola like the GT120 in as a base video card. The 5770 is a pretty nice card. The 5870 rocks. Those looking for that power-hungry monstrosity know as the GTX 480 will get it eventually as Nvidia had some basic drivers squirreled away in their latest update.


I'm more interested in the iMac upgrades. Not much on the high end (a small boost in CPU and video card), but the low end got a much bigger bump. The i3/i5 dualies will be a big step up over the Core 2 Duos. No more crappy 9400M on the low end. The 4670 isn't that great, but it's a helluva lot better than the bloody 9400M, which was just insulting to put in an iMac. The 5670 is a nice boost for the midrange, too. The 5750 is only a tad faster than the 4850, so not much of an upgrade there.

And the SSD + HD on the 27" is a pretty darned nifty option. Oh, and those are definitely not mobile i3/i5 chips, so we're seeing desktop CPUs...which means they're almost certainly socketed! Who wants to be the first to toss an i7 in that 21.5"?

EDIT: Confirmed! Just checked the service manual and the 21.5" uses a standard 1156 socket! I think that makes this the first iMac that will have feasible and relatively cheap CPU upgrades! Buy the i3 and stick an i5 750 in there for under $200 if you're brave enough to crack the damn thing and void the warranty.

Socket 1156 is being replaced by socket 1155 when Intel launches Sandybridge. That'll probably happen in January 2011.

I'd at least like the option of a low-end video card, especially since now you can only get two cards rather than 4, since they're double wide. Yes, they have 3 ports instead of 2, but that means a downgrade in the maximum monitors (not that many people actually use more than 6 monitors, but a second card would also block a PCIe slot that could be used for something else).


I noticed the CPUs as well when I saw the specs. It looks like the i5 is a 760 and the i7 is an 870. I think the 870 is the best 1156 chip for now (except the 875, which wouldn't matter since you can't overclock an iMac anyway). I wonder if you could stick a Xeon in there and use ECC memory since the memory controller is in the CPU these days. I know the Xeon would at least work. Not sure about the ECC memory though.

ECC support requires two pieces... a compatible memory controller and BIOS support for the feature. Phenoms have always supported ECC, but some motherboards don't support ECC RAM.

I have a 2006 Mac Pro model. For $3k it better last me at least five years. My only complaint about this model is the lack of video card support. It's such a huge improvement to have good cards over the stock OEM crap they shovel into these beasts and being locked out via an arbitrary cockblock kinda rubs people like me the wrong way, especially for a system meant to be expanded and improved upon.

I'm seriously hoping the 5870 has two 6 pin connectors and doesn't use an 8 pin connector. That way I can install one.

I know, but it's not like they'll immediately stop selling 1156 chips when that happens.

There are 5870s that use 2x6 pin, so even if Apple's doesn't, you can always slap the right off-the-shelf card into it with a hack.

I'm assuming by hack you mean netkas' works. Assuming Apple didn't purposely force ATI/Sapphire to limit the card's EFI boot ROM to 64-bit EFI only, with two 6 pin connectors the card would work in a Mac Pro 1,1, just at half the available total bandwidth (not that anything thus far can even begin to saturate PCI-E 1.0 slots, let alone PCI-E 2.0 slots).

If Apple's 5870 uses two 6 pin connectors, I'm definitely onboard, even if it means I have to finally cave in and install Snow Leopard and update it (I still currently run 10.5.8 because SL has had many issues with the HID/Resolution switching programs I use). A card with roughly 3x the power of a 3870 for less than half the energy cost. This I would love.

a bit OT but relating to early mac pros-- have any of you got 64bit EFI working on a real 32bit EFI only Mac with Chameleon? is it possible or worth it?

Cnet has a pretty good breakdown of what the chips Apple are using really do
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20011862-64.html
tricky tricky tricky tricky

So we can get 64-bit Win7/Vista on the 2006 Mac Pros, but still no go on 64-bit Snow Leopard? All because of an irritating 32-bit bootloader that nobody seems to be able to (or wants to) work around.

Aaand I just found out that the late 2009 iMacs used desktop 775 CPUs as well. I wonder if power draw would kill the ability to upgrade? Maybe the dual core 27" would be the only feasible dual-to-quad self-upgrade in this generation. Either that or spend a bundle on the lower-wattage CPUs.

The highest TDP 1156 CPU is only 95w. I believe the dual core i3s and i5s are 73w. I'd be surprised if the power supplies were already that close to their absolute maximum, and I'm sure the motherboards themselves would support them.

They will try. Socket 1156 will have only been on the market for 15 months or so when they introduce socket 1155. Intel has done something similar in the past: remember the socket 423 Pentium 4's? They were on the market for a similar amount of time and quickly phased out in favor of socket 478 variants. Socket 1156 has another strike against it as it is a low end socket where long term upgradability is of no concern to Intel or major OEM's that use them. As soon as Sandybridge arrives on socket 1155, I would not expect any more socket 1156 chips to be released to the public.*

*I suspect that Intel will try to pawn off what ever inventory they have left in the channel to an OEM. In the meantime, there is a chance that there will be a Core i7 880 or 885K released before Sandybridge arrives.

Intel is still selling socket 775 chips in boatloads, and not just the sub-$100 ones, either. 423 was discontinued quickly because it was inadequate to power chips beyond 2ghz, plain and simple. Also, Sandy Bridge will start with quads, but it'll be a while before Intel ramps up six, eight, and low-end dual core versions (can't remember if they're even planning dual for SB). Intel isn't going to crank out any NEW 1156 chips except possibly a slight bump or revision here and there as they've done with 775, but they'll keep selling them for a while yet.