akalin.cx

I was long overdue for a computer upgrade so I decided to take the plunge and get the newly-upgraded Mac Pro. Here are my thoughts in no particular order.

First, this thing is seriously heavy, weighing 43.4 lbs when removed from the box. It is much quieter than my old Athlon, though.

I was waiting to buy this because I was expecting the 8-core (or “arachnocore” if you prefer) models to go from stupidly expensive ($4000) to moderately expensive ($2800). I bought the stock configuration; not buying RAM or extra hard drives from Apple was a no-brainer, and although I wanted to get the 8800 GT instead of the default 2600 XT it would have pushed the shipment date out over a month. I can always upgrade later which might cost a little more, depending on how much I can sell the 2600 XT for.

Babbage:~ akalin$ for i in `seq 1 8`; do (yes $i >/dev/null &); done
Babbage:~ akalin$ top -o cpu
  PID COMMAND      %CPU   TIME   #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT  RSHRD  RSIZE  VSIZE
53600 yes         99.1%  0:25.62   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53612 yes         99.0%  0:25.58   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53604 yes         98.6%  0:25.27   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53598 yes         98.0%  0:25.74   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53608 yes         95.6%  0:25.30   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53602 yes         94.6%  0:25.84   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53606 yes         94.5%  0:25.49   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M
53610 yes         93.1%  0:25.77   1    13     18  208K   188K   416K    18M

Yeap, it’s 8 cores all right. I’m a bit disappointed that the overall CPU usage in “top” is properly normalized to [0%, 100%] instead of the more impressive [0%, 800%], though.

It is nice to be running a *nix as a primary OS again. However, one thing Windows does well is support weird display configurations, like my two rotatable widescreen monitors. I’m still using one of the monitors for my old computer but hopefully OS X will be able to switch monitor orientations (preferably with a hotkey) like my old setup. I’ll find out soon.

Setting up Boot Camp was a breeze but I had a ton of problems with Parallels. First I tried using it with my Boot Camp partition but it never detected my keyboard and mouse no matter how long I waited. Worse yet, it messed up the driver configuration enough so that even with booting back into Windows from Boot Camp I was unable to use my keyboard and mouse. After I started having weird freezes when switching back and forth between OS X and Windows I decided to scrap the Windows partition and start over. After installing Windows a second time I used Disk Utility to image the partition before I tried Parallels on it again. After confirming that it still didn’t work, I just restore the Boot Camp partition from the backup and had Parallels work on its own separate image. It’s slightly more inconvenient but it’s probably a more stable setup.

Another problem with Parallels is that it refuses to start up after a reboot, complaining about not being able to communicate with services. Reinstalling Parallels solves the problem but that’s annoying to do on every reboot. I’ll have to investigate further.

Parallels performs really well even with only 512 MB of RAM allocated to it on business apps and non-3d games. However, its 3d support is still lacking; Mythos suffers from show-stopping graphics corruption and crashes, and even when it runs I get only about 10 fps. However, Mythos performs beautifully with Boot Camp, getting ~40 fps with everything but shadows turned all the way up. This makes me curious as to how well WoW performs, but that’s tempting fate.

Booting into Boot Camp to play games is a bit of a pain but it’s mitigated by being able to hibernate in Windows. Curiously, OS X is lacking in this department; you can use a widget called “Deep Sleep” to put it into the equivalent “Safe Sleep”, but starting the computer again does not let you switch partitions as far as I can tell, so it’s useless for switching quickly between operating systems. I’ll have to investigate further into this, too.

Some miscellaneous gripes:

• Disk Utility has this really weird bug where it would only rarely let me drag the disk to restore from an image to the “Destination” field. I just ended up using the equivalent command-line utility “asr”.
• Not having an eject button on optical drives is annoying, especially when in Windows.
• Safari does not close tabs on middle-click.
• Safari is fickle when deciding when to let you use cmd-shift-left/right to move between tabs.
• Coherence mode in Parallels leaves the entire taskbar visible. Perhaps this has something to do with me using the classic theme/Start menu.
• I wish there was a way to turn off the “Caps Lock protection” in the new thin Apple keyboards as I bind it to Ctrl. I’m not impressed with its feel anyway, so I’ll probably end up buying another keyboard. I’m seriously considering getting the Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2, but it’s stupidly expensive.
• I find the Mighty Mouse quite uncomfortable to use due to its shape. It is also quite finicky and sometimes the pointer goes off wildly to a corner of the screen. I’ll probably stick with an IntelliMouse Explorer.

Overall I’m quite satisfied with this computer. I look forward to learning the ins and outs of OS X which I was unable to really do when interacting with it only on laptops.