Mac Pro Tower Reborn | Hacker News Reader

Mac Pro Tower Reborn

onerivermedia.com

23 pointsrbanffy10 comments

I've always thought that version of the Mac Pro was one of the most beautifully designed towers I've ever seen.

I remember the first time I played with one. That thing was unbelievably fast.

Reminded me a bit my first contact with a fully tricked out deskside Sun E450. It was so fast I thought I was doing something wrong.

The most amazing thing is how in each case the passage of time saw each machine become slower and slower until eventually they are nothing but a relic.

The weird thing is even a smartphone running basically stock apps and nothing else will still exhibit the same effect. Blistering fast out of the box, frustratingly slow by the time it's replaced. I wonder sometimes if the CPU isn't clocking itself down based on some cycle count, or maybe the flash is literally wearing down and losing IOPS.

What about the fact that developers are writing more and more bloated and slow applications ?

The writer makes an odd choice opting for 1333Mhz memory. I would have thought if they're already spending that much on this big of an upgrade they would have gone for at least 1600Mhz.

Or can you not get 16000Mhz memory for a Mac Pro?

Circa 2009 I did this with a G5 Tower (Purchased on eBay for about $60) which was the same design except for some internal differences in mounting. The trick is you buy a PC motherboard mounter intended to be used to make custom cases and you install it in the G5 case. Bam you have a Mac Pro case that will use off the shelf PC components. I ran it as a Hackintosh for a few years but currently it has Windows 8.1 on it. Processor speed requirements have not moved much in that with two GTX 670s in SLI six years later it can still run pretty much every game out there at max settings.

> but currently it has Windows 8.1 on it

You know you will have a place in hell for this. Not only ripping out the guts of an elegant PowerPC machine to replace it with an x86 brain, but making it run Windows... This is so wrong... ;-)

This just might inspire me to (finally) upgrade my MacPro 1,1.

Mine's in it's box. I can neither use it or let it go. First Xeon, 2006 I think.

tl;dr: upgradeability FTW, both on price and performance.

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