ok guys, Milan.. sell out you say? (jokingly I know, but..)
yes i'd have said that back a few years ago, but like I said, Mac's now are just Intel machines like our own PC's... the reason I am thinking it's time to switch is cos of 2 things
1. mac's now piss on ibm machines, we'd have to build a machine on a specialist server board to compete.
2. what we used to mock apple owners for... that they couldnt get under the hood and do anything, whereas we could change parts, upgrade processors etc
well you could always upgrade the processor and ram in G4's and G3's, but I still think pc's at that time offered more bang for buck even with a fiddle cheap mac upgrade, but with the Intel Mac's it's worth upgrading and you CAN upgrade mac processors yourself!
Although not documented by mac for the public, they released a service manual for 'approved mac personel', which included instructions for removing and replacing... the cpu's!
Anandtech tried a processor upgrade way back, and it worked!.. they chucked in 2 pre-release Clovertown processors and got 8 cores!!!.. tested 100% fine
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6 So, while accessing the processors on a mac pro isnt easy like a pc, you can in theory buy a s/h low end mac quad and bump it up to a top of the range 8 core by just adding a couple of quad XEON chips!!.. Do you realise the saving this'll mean? and of course you can boot xp or vista on a mac pro... there's plenty of people out there running mac pro's with 4 boot OS's!... Leopard, Linux, XP and Vista!!!
also the XEON chips have a faster fsb speed than core2duo, so even a basic dual-core XEON is faster than the exact same clocked core2duo chip.. eg, in theory and old mac pro twin at 2.66 should beat a new imac at the same speed, and the IMAC'S cost like 1400 quid for the 24"... mac pro twins are out there quite cheap, and I'm assuming it's possible you can replace the dual core XEON to a quad perhaps to get a piss cheap quad core, although so far I didnt find anything on this
anyways, the point is we now have pretty much almost the same tweaking ability on mac pro's that we have on IBM pc's except it's a much more exclusive club in that few regular mac owners have the balls to do this cos it invalidates warranty of course... the other slight downside is Fully Buffered ram costs a bit more, but there's a solution to that also - Anandtech again showed this long before 3rd party ram appeared, and cheap ram can be found now on any pc-parts site
As we noted in our initial Mac Pro article, Apple's memory upgrades are pretty expensive and other than a fancy heatsink, they are standard DDR2 FB-DIMMs. We wondered if we could buy third party memory from companies like Crucial or Kinston, with much better prices, and use it in the Mac Pro. We got 512MB, 1GB and 2GB FB-DIMM modules from Crucial with standard heatspreaders and tried them in the Mac Pro. Thankfully the memory worked just fine, however we did have concerns about cooling. Apple clearly outfitted its FB-DIMM modules with a very large heatsink for a reason and it wasn't for bragging rights.
We had no problems running all of our benchmarks with the standard Crucial FB-DIMMs; however, if we ran a memory stress test for even just a short period of time the modules quickly reported correctable ECC errors. Apple's original modules did not generate any ECC errors, so it looks like the additional cooling is necessary under the most extreme situations.
In response to the issues, companies like Crucial have released revised FB-DIMMs that meet Apple's thermal specifications. We have yet to receive any for review but we're assuming that they will work fine given that Crucial guarantees proper operation in a Mac Pro. So although regular FB-DIMMs that work in other Intel 5000X based motherboards will work in the Mac Pro, we would suggest selecting modules that meet Apple's thermal specifications in order to be on the safe side. anyways as i'm sure you know you can go to any pc retailer now and buy 3rd party 'official' mac pro ram WAY cheaper than from MAC... which is important cos from what i've been reading, with the 4 and 8 core macs you need a stick of ram idealy for each cpu so each has it's own stick otherwise with just 2 dimms in an 8core you reduce the memory buss width by half
apparently it is even possible to upgrade an old mac pro twin (perhaps a dual 2.66 standard) to a quad core, and there's one guy out there who published a document with pictures showing you how to upgrade the super-cheap mac mini to a core2duo! so you get an imac for like 50 quid on top of the mac mini price.. i already have a mate running garageband on a mac mini and its enuff for him to write songs for his publisher and he works with signed artists regularly
here's more stuff:
Upgrade a quad core to an 8 core cheaply Upgrade a mac MINI to a core2duo!anyways, this is all new to me, so no doubt there's tons more out there on this subject..
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I had an idea for a script once. It's basically Jaws except when the guys in the boat are going after Jaws, they look around and there's an even bigger Jaws. The guys have to team up with Jaws to get Bigger Jaws.... I call it... Big Jaws!!!