Jason Bryant Blog

So my new Mac Pro has arrived…

Last month I wrote about the reasons for going with the Mac Pro over the new iMac.

The best way to describe my new Quad-core Mac Pro is that it thinks as fast as I can. Okay, maybe not as fast as a human brain, but it’s still very speedy. I like working with lots of programs open at once. I’ll be uploading photos to Flickr, while downloading video from iTunes, writing an email and re-encoding a video file. Doing all this at once will bog many machines down, but not the new Mac Pro. I have yet to see it slow down. The only limiting factor is the speed of the internet (which has nothing to do with my computer). Otherwise it handles everything I can throw at it. Thanks to multi-threading my 4 processors appear as 8 to the software and I have yet to max out more than one or two at a time. Often tasks are spread out over the 8 cores evenly, with 10 to 20% usage.

I went with 8 GB of RAM and that certainly helps with my problem of having a lot of programs open at once. But the funny thing is, I feel less of a need to have many programs open at once because they don’t take very long to open. One icon bounce in the dock and BAM, it’s ready to go. I hated how long it took programs to load on the old iMac, which led me to leave stuff open all the time and consequently slow the machine down even more by having a lot of programs open.

The other thing that really helps with overall speed is to have a lot of empty space on your hard drive. If you’re down to 10-15% free space, you’re going to start running into big problems with slowdown. I have all four hard drive bays filled with two 1 TB and two 500 GB drives.

I reformatted my old iMac with a new install of Leopard and don’t have nearly the number of programs running on it, because it’s going to be my dad’s computer and he doesn’t need all those apps. Since doing that, the iMac now boots up super fast and is very snappy. Interesting that Macs, just like Windows, do seem to slow down as you install more apps and have more stuff running in the background. Not really a surprise, but something to think about if you’re noticing your machine slowing down. Might want to consider a fresh install, after backing up your data of course.

Back in December 2007 I had upgraded to Leopard on the iMac and had problems with GarageBand crashing on initializing. I never did solve the problem and even the new GarageBand does not load on my new Mac Pro. Just hangs during the load and crashes. The Apple forums are filled with posts about GarageBand crashing on startup. I suspect it has to do with my Pro Tools install. If I have a clean install of Leopard and iLife 09, GarageBand loads no problem, but as soon as I import my user data and settings it crashes. I would much rather have all my preferences and data from my old Mac, than have GarageBand work. I could start from scratch, but that would take a whole weekend to sort out. As someone pointed out, you can try going through all your Application Support files and MIDI files, but I’ve already wasted enough time with that. It’s not worth it. So I won’t be using GarageBand.

Aside from GarageBand not working, I am very happy with the Mac Pro and am glad I decided to spend the extra money and get something with some more horsepower than the iMac. I would recommend the Quad-Core to anyone like me who does more with their computer than the average soccer mom or student. The 8-Core is really only for people who are using high-end 3D software or if you need to render HD video, or if you have money burning a hole in your pocket.

Here are some benchmarks and reviews for the 2009 Mac Pros…

Macworld
MacRumors
Engadget