Saturday, August 12, 2006

Mac Pro First Glance

One of the designers at work got himself a Mac Pro today and I helped him set it up. It’s a completely stock machine right now (dual 2.6 dual-cores, 1 GB RAM and one 250 GB HD). He’s getting a total of 3 GB of RAM and an extra 250GB HD, but he only just ordered that stuff today. New Egg, w00t!.

The machine feels *very* snappy for Finder copies and general “window-ing” type stuff. Never saw the beach ball while just mousing around or dinking with his iTunes. You double click on the HD icon or a server volume and *boom* it’s just there. Which is exactly what you’d expect from a brand new vanilla box, of course.

The big stuff that designers and people like me care about:  :-]

Illustrator (CS2): Not too bad. For your everyday use (making a logo, playing with type, standard Illustrator stuff), it’s totally fine. I did bring the machine to its knees by opening a 350 MB Illustrator file. All vector art, too. No placed images. That file is a beast. It has all kinds of gradients and about a zillion points in there. The Mac Pro was marginally slower than my dual G5 manipulating that same file in Illustrator, but not by too much. My G5 has 5 GB of RAM and the Mac Pro is RAM poor right now, so that might be part of the problem. But the overall machine was molasses when I opened that stupid file. Spinning beach ball city. My G5 didn’t really blink while switching among open apps. I think if the Mac Pro had the RAM it will eventually have, it might be “OK.” But no one except us is really stupid enough to make 350MB vector files, so maybe that isn’t a fair test. But for doing “normal” Illustrator stuff, I think as long as you didn’t starve the machine of RAM, you’d be fine. I wasn’t too worried about Illustrator. It’s the next one that’s the big Kahuna.

Photoshop (CS2): Again, the Mac Pro was RAM poor here, too. But I diddled around on a couple of JPEGs from my camera (13 MB uncompressed), and nothing untoward happened. I didn’t put a stopwatch to anything I did in PS, but I think it would be “OK” to use. Unsharp Mask and Curves worked without a hitch and I never felt like I was waiting overly long for the machine to do its thing. I’ll go over to his house once he has the RAM in and see how it really performs. It’s a shame Adobe wasn’t ready for these machines when they came out. But I’m pretty sure they’ve had to basically convert *everything* over to xCode and I think Photoshop weighs in at over 30 million lines of code. So I can forgive them for being a little slow out of the gate, but it’ll be really nice when everything is Universal-ready. If my life depended on Photoshop for my daily bread and I was doing layer-heavy print-ready files (300 dpi), I’d probably hold off. For doing web (lo-res) stuff, you’d probably be OK. Amazing how it’s all about Photoshop, huh?

Word: No problems. Office 2004 ran without any problems, though I didn’t muck around too much. Just made sure Excel and Word opened.

iTunes: Holy crap! It encoded a whole CD in like 12 seconds! OK, that’s not true at all, but it was pretty damn fast. The little read out thing hit 34x every now and then. Though every now and then it would dip down to 18x. Standard AAC encoding without the “repair scratched CD” stuff turned on in the iTunes preferences. Out of the box settings, basically. I think the best I’ve ever seen my G5 encode at was in the low 20x range. But I rarely encode CDs anymore. :-] iTunes is of course a Universal app, and I could totally tell (anecdotal evidence, of course) that the Mac Pro was far speedier.

I did a small thing with Handbrake (a Universal app) converting a DVD to an iPod ready file and it was faster. Though not by too much, which surprised me. I think the speed of the optical drive is the determining factor there, though. The machine is probably waiting for data from the optical drive. A better test would be Handbrake on a DVD that had already been ripped to a hard drive, which is my normal modus operandi for ripping DVDs to iPod friendly MPEG-4 files. Didn’t have time to try that, though.

I wish I had tried something with QuickTime encoding, but I forgot. :-[

My verdict: If you use Universal apps, the new Mac Pros are *crazy* fast. No brainer. If I were a motion graphics fellow who used Final Cut Pro, Logic and stuff like that which had already been “Universal-ized”, I’d totally go for it. Old apps like Photoshop are “acceptable.” What’s weird is that if you bought a Mac Pro right now, you’d basically be buying for the future. And who EVER buys hardware for future speed? :-] Once CS3 comes out, everything will be a go. And obviously Apple has done a *tremendous* job making all their apps work on Intel. Really, it’s quite amazing that they announced OS X on Intel last year and now everything in their HW line-up is intel-ized. *applause*

I’m distinctly reminded of the 680X0 to PPC transition and then the Classic to OS X transition. Everything works. The old stuff acts totally the way you’d expect, albeit a wee bit slower. RAM is the solution to most ills there though, I think and hope. Speaking of Classic: It’s completely gone. Won’t even work on Intel beasts, though I didn’t specifically try.

RAM and extra drives would totally be a snap to install. The RAM sits on risers that pop out from the motherboard, just like a standard PCI card. Drives are equally easy. Tug the sled thing out, screw the new drive onto it (screws included on the sled) and slide it back in. Sadly, they’ve done away with the clear plastic side panel. The complete dork that I am, I always liked to be able to have the silver side cover off and see into the belly of the beast while it was running. But oh well.

Another cool, but ultimately stupid thing: When you fire up Activity Monitor and have it show the CPU usage floating window, all four cores show up. So instead of two bars dancing up and down, you can see FOUR bars. Cool, but a bit useless. :-] Though I will say this, while the machine was cranking on something (ripping a CD, etc.), it always appeared that there was plenty of “head-room” in those bars. None of them were ever pegged solid.

And it’s really quiet. I could only tell the fans were on when it was encoding the AAC file in iTunes. Compared to the Xserve that’s across the room, it’s a church mouse. :-] Not a fair comparison at all since Xserves can be pretty “fan-ny” and loud.

Another designer bought herself a Mac Book Pro, and I set it up for her, but then she went on vacation, so I don’t really know how things are going for her. She’ll be back on Monday, though so I’ll ask her how things are going.

And here’s a fun little tid-bit from my Apache server logs:

(IP Address removed) - - [12/Aug/2006:13:52:22 -0600] “GET /images01/rnt01.png HTTP/1.1” 200 6609 “http://www.ransom-note-typography.com/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3”

“Intel Mac OS X”

There are ice cubes in hell, right now. :-]

Jon scribbled this mess on 08/12/06 at 04:07 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Twitter

    Favorite Entries

    If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

     

    Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

     

    Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?


    ©2005-2010 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.