The Mac Pro: What a Machine!
Right. so a few months ago, I bought a Mac Pro. the machine I bought has 2 Xeon processors, each with Dual Cores, running at 2.66Gz, a gig of ram (which I still need to get upgraded), a 160Gb hdd (again, need an upgrade) and an ATI Radeon X1900 graphics card with 512mb ram. a few weeks ago, I decided to install Windows on to the box. My plan was to install Vista X64 edition, but due to lack of drivers from Apple (always blame Apple! they have drivers for X32 windows XP, but none yet for Vista or X64), I finally installed Windows XP. I was thinking Server 2003, but XP is doing a good job, for the moment.
So, this thing is a beast. other than the slight lack of RAM (ideally, I should have 4Gb, and will be getting 2 1Gb sticks soon) this machine rocks. I am currently writing this blog post, downloading stuff from the web, encoding videos for my XBox 360 (from DivX to MPEG2) and outlook is open too. All this and the processors are ticking over at 25%. one of my cores is running 100% on the encoding of video (using Videora, which makes me wonder why its not available in multi threading mode…) and that’s it! the system is just sitting there doing what it needs to do! and the speed of video encoding? the video I’m encoding is about 47 min long, and its estimating a finish time is less than 14 min! 4X real time! image if it was Multi threaded!
I Love this machine!