SynApps The Open Source and Gadget blog

It was hard to order a MacPro the day his Steveness came down to earth to have his lieutenants announce the MacPro but the next morning I finally succeeded. I was shocked to learn that Apple charges 2,430 EUR for a total of 8Gigs of RAM and 389 EUR for a 500Gig HD. It seems Apple has started the photocopiers to leech Dell's pricing politics.

For us Europeans it's already hard enough that Steve decided to act like the central bank of China and define a EUR to USD exchange rate to be 1 Dollar per Euro, where it currently stands at 1.28 Dollars per Euro. So we already pay a base price of 2,449 EUR (=3,135 USD) instead of 2,499 USD.

What I ordered

So I ordered a 1Gig RAM 250Gig HD configuration with two optical drives and two GT7300 cards for a total of 3,549 EUR including Taxes:

 What I wanted and what I did

Upping it to 8 Gig RAM and 4x500Gig HD would have brought the price to 7,349 EUR - so I had a virtual budget of 3,800 EUR for the RAM and HD's. I am writing all this to share with you if you can really upgrade the MacPro with off-the-shelf components.

So I ordered 8 Kingston DDR2 1024MB 667MHZ DIMM's at 97 EUR each and 4 Western Digital CAVIAR SE16 500GB SATA2 HD's at 195 EUR each, totalling to 1,556 EUR- that is 2,243 EUR less than the Apple store configuration.

Now it only has to work.

Arrival of the Woodcrest Mactel

Scheduled for next Tuesday, stay tuned... (end of part one)

(part two) Well, not quite. I received an email saying SORRY we'll be a week late. That same day however I received another mail that was really happy about the fact that the baby was shipped. It arrived - Friday. Anyway - it was there, the components where there but thanks to an Ars Technica review I realized that I may have ordered the wrong RAM's (unbuffered DDR2) so I made sure I had a backup 4 times 2 Gig DDR2 RAM fully buffered at 2GB each DIMM that were even cheaper (4 Euros per 2 Gig, wow). I always knew the DDR was going to take over, Chancelorette Merkel is DDR 2.0! Btw: if you order 4 x 2Gigs at the Apple shop it will be another 200EUR extra. So the total savings will get you to 2,451 EUR

Here is what was inside the black box:

A lot of all the same from the outside. But the inside has changed 100%. That I find very courtageous for a design company ;-) Anyway --- the inside. It looked like the picture on the left a year ago:

This is the machine that was shipped to ADC members a year ago

and then - and then a miracle happened. A lot of talk about the Woodcrest dual core Xeons but what really strikes me is the fact that Apple put in four *standard* carriers for *standard* SATA drives and two DDR2 RAM carriers each having *four* *standard* fully bufferered RAM DIMMS into the machine. All required screws are there, all aluminum parts etc. The only thing Apple did not ship is the big cooling grills for the RAM.

What happened

The standard MacPro configuration may already be considered cheaper than Dell. What I found quite amazing is that there is no lock-in to the expensive extras. Dell and most other brand manufacturers always had a history of expensive upgrade options. To make sure you bought them there were proprietary parts attached to standard components. Apple's current shop prices may suggest that Apple would like to make money on extra RAM and HD - but the actual hardware allows you to plug in standard components (any SATA(2) HD, any fully buffered DDR2 RAM).

Plugging it in

As expected the unbuffered RAM's didn't work, you cannot even plug them in which may be a good thing. I took out the original HD (a Western Digital WD2500JC) and the two 512MB DIMMS with their giant heatsinks, bolted the four new HD's on to the aluminum carriers and plugged them in, plugged 2 of the new DIMMS to each of the two carriers (leaving space for another 4 DIMMS) and was done after 5 minutes.

The difference

What is quite amazing and quite a difference to the profane PC's is the fact that you can boot a "naked" Mac with the install DVD plugged in with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse connected, set up a three drive RAID0 boot drive and install OSX to it without hassle. Wow.

The result

The "Main drive" has 1,5TB striped on three of the four drives. The fourth awaits XP and Linux. And it has 8GB of RAM. And it is QUIET! You will never go back to a G5 simply for the noise - even though the machine has 4 HD's but it has passive graphics cards. The only disappointment is the "perceived speed" - it does not feel much faster than the "old" Dual that I have.

Overview

The SATA drives

1.5 RAID0

RAM glory

After a few days

Some things Apple does are adorable. Plug a display to the second graphics card and there it is. No need to set up anything. The same is true for the power management. The hard disks are switched off after a while of inactivity. So far so good. Unfortunately there is always a process somewhere that wants to access the HD's every minute or whatever. This lead to my wonderful three-drive RAID array to be switched off and on every minute - in turn leading to quite some noise. This is not an issue when you constantly work on the machine - but I switch between my Windows Box and the Mac.

So the RAID array had to go. I decided to copy the RAID partition to an image and restore it to a single drive. I also thought I knew how to do that but at the heat of the moment I didn't find where (it's in the HD tool). So I downloaded cccloner and copied the partition to an external USB drive. Unfortunately it seems the Mac still cannot boot from a USB drive so I had to find a Firewire - repeated the steps, booted from the Firewire drive, deleted the RAID array, copied from Firewire to first SATA drive, removed the three other drives and - the MacPro wouldn't boot because it could not find the boot drive.

After looking around I realised that the "logical" drive 0 is not necessarily the physical drive 1 inside the Mac. So I tried the other three and of course it was the last one of them.

More Links

• Some MacPro pr0n: http://www.powermax.com/articles_reviews/article.php?id=33
• Ars Technica Review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macpro.ars
• If this is not enough how about upgrading to 8 cores?