Items tagged with Mac Pro
Apple's "trash can" Mac Pro was heralded as a remarkable achievement in design and performance [by Apple] when it was first announced back in 2013. However, the machine was neglected by Apple, and was hardly updated during its lifecycle. In fact, Apple made the rare admission that the design of the current Mac Pro's chassis wasn’t optimized for the workflows that professionals actually required. “Being able to put larger single GPUs required a different system architecture and more thermal capacity than that system was designed to accommodate," said Apple’s Craig Federighi in April 2017 while speaking to reporters. "And so it became fairly difficult to adjust.” Apple won't...
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As if we needed more examples to demonstrate how outdated Apple’s current Mac Pro line is, a $1500 USD AMD Ryzen R7 1700 powered PC recently smoked a loaded $5500 Mac Pro in a Photoshop benchmark. Tech Guy posted the showdown to his YouTube channel recently as part of a series for content creators to understand the differences between different systems. Mac Pros have maintained a strong reputation among creative professionals despite lacking any revisions since 2013. The two computers tested have more or less analogous CPUs on the surface, each housing 8-cores clocked at 3.0GHz. Both systems are running 250GB solid-state drives and the Mac Pro has four times as much system memory with 64GB of...
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With the launch of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti last month, NVIDIA for the most part surpassed the performance of the Pascal-based Titan X while undercutting the graphics card’s price point by hundreds. Unfortunately for the GTX 1080 Ti, its reign at the top didn’t last long as NVIDIA is ratcheting up the performance potential of Pascal yet again with the new Titan Xp. If you’re looking for the ultimate in graphics performance in a single card on the PC, it doesn’t any better than this. The Titan Xp is more potent than both the original Pascal-based Titan X and the GTX 1080 Ti, as it represent the Pascal GP102 core fully "unlocked". When it comes to specs, you’ll find: 12GB GDDR5X memory operating...
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Apple this week has done two uncharacteristic things for the company: it is apologizing for missteps in its product design/rollout and it is actually pre-announcing upcoming products. Some of those products are at least a year away from release. What’s going on in Cupertino these days? To the first point, Apple is finally admitting to what we have all known for years: the current generation Mac Pro was a mistake. After launching the professional-grade machine in 2013, Apple has done little to upgrade the system, leaving long-time Apple fans upset and without many options with regards to improving performance. However, the main reason for Apple’s failure to upgrade the machine was that it ran...
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If you’re hip to pre-built, small-form factor gaming systems, MSI is now shipping quite a whopper of a PC which it claims is the world’s smallest gaming tower. The Vortex measures just 10.5 inches tall and aims straight for the jugular with an unlocked Intel Core i7 6700K processor paired with either 16GB (2x8GB) or 32GB (4x8GB) of DDR4 2133MHz memory. On the graphics front, you have two choices: you can go with either a dual NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 GPUs (6GB) or dual GeForce GTX 980 (16GB). The graphics subsystem is 4K-ready and capable of simultaneously outputting to up to six displays. Storage duties are handled by dual PCIe 256GB SSDs in conjunction with a 1TB 7200RPM HDD. Other niceties include...
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Following a rash of user complaints over various video issues, Apple is launching a Repair Extension Program for late 2013 Mac Pro systems manufactured between February 8, 2015, and April 11, 2015. The issue with 2013 Mac Pro models manufactured between those dates is that some of them are running defective GPUs.Apple isn't making much noise about the program—the folks at MacRumors caught wind of it through an internal memo it obtained, and according to that memo, Apple's investigation of the reported problems led them to conclude that faulty GPUs are to blame. Affected systems can see a variety of symptoms, including distorted video or no video at all, system freezes, system restarts and shutdowns,...
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One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgradeability and flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made upgrading or using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say "effectively" because while third-party SSDs will still work, they'll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when its sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive...
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Microsoft could take a few lessons from BOXX in how to poke fun at the competition in a tactful yet hilarious manner. BOXX, which builds high-end workstations and rendering systems for a variety of applications -- film and television, visual effects, game development, simulation, government and defense, and the list goes on -- decided to compare its own professional workstation with Apple's Mac Pro. The result? A comical YouTube video, for one. Having just purchased a cylindrical shaped Mac Pro, Nate eagerly shows it off to his friend Drew, who is less than impressed with the hardware -- or lack thereof -- inside. Things start off well enough when Nate confirms his Mac Pro wields an Intel Xeon...
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You're not bringing home a Mac Pro for less than three large, and when spending that much on a computer, the expectation is that it will work and work well for a long time to come. Fair enough, but eventually you'll either want or need to dive in; it could be out of sheer curiosity or because a stick of RAM went bad. When that time comes, you'll be happy to know that Apple's cylinder shaped powerhouse is mostly easy to take apart. The folks at iFixIt got their hands on Apple's entry-level model priced at $2,999. This is the configuration that comes with an Intel Xeon E5 quad-core processor with 10MB of L3 cache and Turbo Boost up to 3.9GHz, 12GB of ECC DDR3-1866 memory (3x4GB), dual AMD FirePro...
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You're not bringing home one of Apple's newly released Mac Pro systems without spending a small fortune -- pricing starts at $2,999 for a quad-core model and $3,999 for a 6-core foundation, both of which are rocking dual graphics cards. There's some seriously powerful hardware inside these machines, but are they worth the asking price? That's up to the buyer to decide, and to help answer that question, Macworld got its hands on an 8-core Intel Xeon E5 (3.0GHz) configuration and put the system through its paces. It also had 32GB of RAM, 512GB of flash storage, and dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics with 6GB of video memory per card. As you might expect, this thing made easy-work out of Macworld's...
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Some big money was raised at a special (RED) charity auction at Sotheby's in New York City over the weekend. One of the hottest items turned out to be a special edition red Mac Pro designed by Jony Ive and Mark Newson, which brought in a generous $977,000. It was the fourth biggest money maker during an auction in which almost $13 million was raised for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Mac Pro is the same one that Apple will begin selling to the public in December, except it has a red exterior rather than a black one. Non-auction models will have a starting price of $3,000, well south of the $977,000 the red model fetched, which was expected to bring in between $40,000...
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If there's one thing Apple has proven to be quite good at, it's design. Love it or hate it, Apple's design chops have drawn all sorts of attention, and the company's latest foray into the waning desktop world has yet again struck a chord. Pundits suggest that the forthcoming Mac Pro looks about like a black trash bucket that you'd find in any home improvement store, while proponents are hailing it as the biggest leap forward in workstation design history. Regardless of your own personal feelings, the new Mac Pro is an eye-catcher, and if you're really (really!) into the design language, there's another variation you should know about. As Apple has done occasionally in the past, the company is...
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History doesn't always repeat itself, particularly when you're trying to juggle supply chains across the globe year in and year out, but it seems that 2013 will mirror 2012 in terms of Apple event launches in the fall. Last year, we saw the new iPhone and iPad launched within weeks of one another. This year, it appears that the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s launch will be followed by a new iPad, a refreshed iPad mini, and perhaps a few other surprises. AllThingsD is reporting that Apple's next iPad will be unveiled at a California event on October 22nd. The focal point will obviously be the iPad, where the larger, full-size iPad is expected to acquire the 64-bit A7 processor housed in the iPhone 5s....
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It's been a good few weeks for AMD. The semiconductor design firm's products are everywhere at E3, even if they aren't always front-and-center on display. AMD's Jaguar CPU core is baked into both the PS4 and Xbox One and its FirePro graphics cards are powering the Apple Mac Pro. Apple isn't giving specs on the cards yet but refers to them as offering up to seven teraflops of procCesing power and 6GB of VRAM. That puts the cards somewhere between W8000 and W9000 GPUs -- the listed configuration is a bit more powerful than the W8000, but the W9000 in pairs would offer 8TFLOP of processing power, not seven. Apple's Mac Pro Cylindrical Power Plant, with AMD FirePro Graphics Powering the Xbox One...
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