I got a Mac Pro this weekend. I broke down after a band rehersal and decided to pull the trigger after wife approval happened. Tom and I went out to the Apple Store in Tysons and got a 8-core 2.8ghz Mac Pro, the middle of the road. I was hesitant because I might have been able to avoid tax with an online purchase or even leverage an employee discount through a friend but I decided I’d rather not deal with shipping and signed delivery.

The MP comes with a 2600XT card and 2gb of RAM (two 1gb dimms). The next thing will be getting the 65nm 8800GT when the kit comes out (in a month) and some generic memory from Newegg. But I’ve found that Newegg doesn’t carry it quite yet but OWC sells it at reasonable prices. The new MP needs 800mhz memory (server memory really) and OWC has 800mhz memory at Newegg’s 667mhz prices. So it’s probably a good deal. 2gb is fine enough but 4gb might help with audio projects, I’ll see.

I migrated all my stuff off TL’s G5 and plan on returning it to him. He was nice enough to loan his quad-core G5 to me so I could test out a Mac-based DAW setup. But at some point I was going to have to give it back so I wanted to do that sooner than later (I had it for over a month iirc) just to not be rude. The G5 is nice but it’s not in the master plan of where the platform is heading.

After the ritualistic unboxing, I moved my mini to my TV and am very happy with it functioning as a Slingbox/Slingcatcher/Apple TV/Media Center type thing. I had to run a bunch of cables for a few hours to make this all happen. I ran out of Mac Pro playing time because of these logistics. But it’s ok, there’s plenty of playing time yet.

I started by patching with Software Update, downloaded some apps. Some apps I just dragged and dropped from the Mac Mini (go OSX). Bootcamp apparently comes standard now so I created a 100gb XP partition (a 320gb drive came with it). I can create a software stripe for more OSX space later with standard SATA drives from Newegg. I rebooted and installed XP (horror), that was actually the longest part of the night. The Mac drivers CD I made for my mini seemed to work ok for the Mac Pro. It had the chipset, network and video drivers to make XP happy on the Mac Pro. After a few more reboots I had a dual-boot thing done.

I held down ALT on the keyboard after rebooting XP to choose the partition to boot from and was back in OSX land. I then downloaded VMWare Fusion 1.1 beta to check out if it can read my Bootcamp partition (I read this is a new feature), I haven’t tried it yet. But combine that with Fusions DirectX9.0 ability, I might have a really nice PC replacement thing going here. We’ll see.

Next up is testing audio projects. This is the main driver behind 8 cores. I have no problem crushing my 1 core PC (3 years old) and even the G5 was skipping and dropping audio with some of my more thick projects. I’ll see how the MP does under this load, hopefully it gives me more power to play/pause and record without having to freeze CPU-heavy tracks.