big mac

My Mac Pro arrived today. It’s pretty awesome. The first time I opened the cpu panel (after installing CHUD), I thought it was broken. I had all my normal stuff running (safari, ichat, mail, many terminals, itunes, console, a few others), and I was kinda sitting back in my chair so I didn’t see anything at first…

about-this-mac-pro cpu-panel

Rudimentary “beat the hell out of QuickTime Player” testing shows that this machine will play a good number of average video files without breaking a sweat. Next I tried 2, then 4 1080i HD quicktime movie trailers, which played simultaneously without dropping any frames.

mp-qtp-screenshot 1080i-quicktime-playback

It was able to sustain it for a good while, QuickTime Player reporting about 300 – 350% cpu usage, but eventually it wedged and had to be force quiteded(ed). (as an aside, note that I did the same tests when I got my g5 tower, and after I had two or three movies open, it *rebooted itself*; thus began my struggle with that machine to keep it thermally cool; alas). It also performed an xcode 2.4 ‘easy’ installation in 3 minutes 11 seconds. Oh, and it runs quake4 very very well :)

Selected stats:

      Machine Name: Mac Pro
      Machine Model: MacPro1,1
      Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Xeon
      Processor Speed: 3 GHz
      Number Of Processors: 2
      Total Number Of Cores: 4
      L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
      Memory: 4 GB
      Bus Speed: 1.33 GHz
   ATI Radeon X1900 XT:
      Chipset Model: ATY,RadeonX1900
      Type: Display
      Bus: PCIe
      Slot: Slot-1
      VRAM (Total): 512 MB
      Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
   Intel High Definition Audio:
      Available Devices:
          Line Out:
              Connection: 1/8 inch Jack
          Headphone:
              Connection: 1/8 inch Jack
          Line In:
              Connection: 1/8 inch Jack
          Speaker:
              Connection: Internal
          S/P-DIF Out:
              Connection: Optical
          S/P-DIF In:
              Connection: Optical

{2} andre@xxxx [~] % df -h -t hfs
Filesystem     Size   Used  Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s2   465G    20G   445G     4%    /
/dev/disk1s3   233G   132G   101G    57%    /Volumes/Bay
/dev/disk2s3   234G   225G   9.0G    96%    /Volumes/idio

idio and Bay are the two disks from the g5. Slide ’em out of the g5, take off the little rail nub screws that keep the drives in place in the g5 slots, put ’em into two of the three available mac pro drive sleds, done. I’ll be doing a propper reformat of the disk they shipped me, and migration of data, but not until I can get on a UPS. We’ve had three power outages in 5 days.

sudo dscl . create /Users/andre NFSHomeDirectory /Volumes/idio/Users/andre ; sudo reboot

works just fine for now :)

About dre

I like all kinds of food.
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