upgrading the mac pro
So, I have been thinking of upgrading my workstation at home for a while now, and I have found one possible solution. See, the MacPro came originally with 2 Dual core Xeons at 2.66Gz. if I wanted to move to 2 Quad Core Xeons (which I do), I would need to buy me a couple of Xeon 5355. These ain’t cheap! Elara are selling them for a 683EUR, each!
So, while playing around, I found this post, talking about overlclocking the E5320 Xeon to 1333Mhz FSB, and how well it works with the mac pro. Given that the E5320's sell for 245EUR, i can get 2 of them for less than the price of 1 of the 5355s. And, since memory is cheap, a couple extra gigs of ram will be thrown in for good mesure... 4Gb Kit (2x2Gb FBDIMMS) cost 136EUR on Shop4Memory at the moment... which makes the total upgrade (2 5320s and 2 4Gb kits) EUR762... only 79EUR more than a single Xeon 5355!
2 Comments : 06.06.08
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i suppose i dont *need* to upgrade, but it would be handy. i do use this machine for running virtual instances, and extra ram will be included in the upgrade (bringing the machine to 12Gb). one thing i want to do more and more of is writing apps that take advantage of multi processors and cores. do having machines with 1, 2 4 and 8 cores would be very usefull for testing... and, in all fairness, i am a geek who wants cutting edge gear! :)
#1
robert
06.07.2008 @ 2:05
Do you really need to upgrade the CPU's?
I'd be inclined to just upgrade the RAM. It depends of course what you intend for the machine.
Most software (depending on the software you plan to use naturally) won't see any benefit from the extra cores. The exception being if you are planning on using it as a virtual server host.