Tragedy struck my house about a month ago. My fifteen year old son was on my computer using Facebook, I’m in the next room watching TV.
“Dad, something broke.”
“What!?!?!”
“It made a noise and now it doesn’t work.”
“Oh my God. Let me take a look.”
He was right, something broke. My guess is the power supply took a dump. Normally this is a cheap, quick fix, if you’re a PC user. Looked up the price for one on my laptop. Ok, $200, pricey, but not the end of the world. However, since I use a Mac, I took the side off the case to see what kind of operation would be involved.
Good God. I am going to have to take everything out of the case to replace this proprietary power supply. Hmmmm. This dual 2.0 GHz G5 Power Mac is five years old in six months, when I had planned to upgrade to an Intel Mac Pro anyway. The Nehalem Mac Pros had just come out a few days before, which is what I had been waiting for. Ok, I didn’t know how I was exactly going to afford an unplanned computer upgrade, but necessity is always a good motivator. Price was going to be an issue for me though, and I wouldn’t be able to set my sights too far off the entry level.
However, once I started looking at the new Mac Pros, the more I started leaning toward the previous generation Harpertown Mac Pros.
The new Mac Pro uses the first implementation of the Nehalem architecture in a Xeon cpu. Nehalem is the next generation Intel architecture, and you PC users know it as Core i7. Nehalem represents as big an evolutionary jump over Core as Core offered over Pentium. We’re all going to be using cpus based on the Nehalem architecture for some time to come.
However, I had been hoping to get a second generation Nehalem. Something with a faster clock speed, or something in a dual cpu eight core model. The new base model Mac Pro uses a single 2.66 GHz quad core processor. Not too big a problem, because a slower Nehalem core will execute single threaded applications faster than a slightly faster cpu from the previous generation.
Also, Nehalem uses hyper threading, which allows each core to run two processes. This doubles the Nehalem architecture chip’s cores from four physical to eight virtual. That’s why a Nehalem quad core of lower clock speed will perform nearly as good as a bona fide eight core from a previous generation.
In theory. Actually, while Nehalem chips do have faster cores, and it shows in single threaded benchmarks, for multi-threaded applications the Nehalem only gets about a 50% boost. So a four core Nehalem that gets advertised as having eight virtual cores actually performs on par with a machine that would have six physical cores.
Another beef I developed while looking at the new Macs was that Apple crippled the quad core machines by only putting 4 slots for ram on the board, compared to the eight slots that all previous generation Mac Pros and the new eight core models enjoy. In addition, these slots were rated by Apple to be good with sticks that were 2 gigs or less. That gave the quad cores a 8 gig ceiling. Now, the after market has already figured out the 4 gig sticks work, but 4 gig sticks are expensive, and 16 gigs is still only half of the previous 32 gig ceiling.
In addition, the new Mac Pros use 1066 MHz DDR3. This is triple channel ram, so you don’t want more or less than 3 sticks per four slots for maximum performance. That limits you to a 12 gig ceiling, or 6 gigs using 2 gig sticks.
All this bugged me a little, so I really started looking hard at the performance of the previous generation eight core Mac Pros in comparison.
Hi, my name is Michael, and I’m obsessive compulsive.
This is one of those instances where my disorder was beneficial. I began a two week cram course on new vs. old Mac Pro. I read benchmarks. I lived on web forums.
Ultimately it broke down to:
- Ram capacity 32 gigs vs 16 gigs. Harpertown.
- Single threaded performance No contest. Nehalem.
- Multi-threaded performance No contest. Harpertown.
- Price Same. Tie.
- Power usage and heat Should favor the new, single cpu architecture. Nehalem.
- Reliability No way to compare. Harpertown has been on the market for a year though. Harpertown.
- Penis Enlarging Factor Faster clock speed, more ram, more cores. No contest. Harpertown.
The 2.8 GHz eight core Mac Pro that was the base model until March 3 sold for $2799. After the new Nehalem Mac Pros came out Apple shipped them all out to their authorized resellers to be sold off from anywhere between $2399 to $2600 and change. While I was doing my homework Amazon, buy.com, and quite a few other retailers ran out, creating a sense of urgency to make my decision.
So tomorrow my new 2.8 GHz eight core Harpertown Mac Pro arrives at the local UPS hub. I snagged it for $2450, $50 less than the new quad core Nehalem. I spent an additional $185 for an extra 8 gigs of Mushkin ram, taking the total ram to 10 gigs. I’ll buy an additional 4 gigs next month to fill all the slots for maximum memory performance, because I was cash poor after having to spring for the new Mac and couldn’t get it all at once. I will also upgrade the OEM graphics card to a Radeon 4870 once prices have come down a little.
Final specs:
Dual 2.8 GHz Harpertown Xeon quad core Mac Pro
14 gigs of DDR2 PC2-6400 800 MHz fully buffered ECC ram
320 gig 7200 rpm hard drive
256 mb Radeon HD 2600XT
16x dual layer Superdrive
I have never minded paying Apple prices, because I’ve kept every Mac I’ve owned for approximately 5 years, and I never owned any PC for more than about a year. The steep buy-in is compensated by the future-proof insurance you get with a top of the line Mac tower.
Future proofing was a concern for me this time around. One, I’m cheap, and two, I have a family and just can’t dump all of my money into toys like I used to. My final decision for the Harpertown over the Nehalem was very much influenced by wanting to make a smart decision, and ultimately I decided that the Harpertown scored higher on the future proof scale because of it’s eight real cores and superior multi-threaded performance. Multi-threading isn’t a novelty. Multi-core cpus are here to stay, and more and more applications will take advantage of them in the future.
I am really excited about my new workstation. Thank God I have a laptop, but after living on it for almost a month I can’t wait to get back on a real computer. The new box should be a beast, and I’m sure many of you can relate to the excitement of imminent new hardware.
