

Mac Pro Tower Reborn - rbanffy
http://www.onerivermedia.com/blog/?p=1572

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Prometheus1981
I've always thought that version of the Mac Pro was one of the most
beautifully designed towers I've ever seen.

~~~
rbanffy
I remember the first time I played with one. That thing was unbelievably fast.

Reminded me a bit my first contact with a fully tricked out deskside Sun E450.
It was so fast I thought I was doing something wrong.

~~~
zaroth
The most amazing thing is how in each case the passage of time saw each
machine become slower and slower until eventually they are nothing but a
relic.

The weird thing is even a smartphone running basically stock apps and nothing
else will still exhibit the same effect. Blistering fast out of the box,
frustratingly slow by the time it's replaced. I wonder sometimes if the CPU
isn't clocking itself down based on some cycle count, or maybe the flash is
literally wearing down and losing IOPS.

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balls2you
What about the fact that developers are writing more and more bloated and slow
applications ?

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Samathy
The writer makes an odd choice opting for 1333Mhz memory. I would have thought
if they're already spending that much on this big of an upgrade they would
have gone for at least 1600Mhz.

Or can you not get 16000Mhz memory for a Mac Pro?

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kenrikm
Circa 2009 I did this with a G5 Tower (Purchased on eBay for about $60) which
was the same design except for some internal differences in mounting. The
trick is you buy a PC motherboard mounter intended to be used to make custom
cases and you install it in the G5 case. Bam you have a Mac Pro case that will
use off the shelf PC components. I ran it as a Hackintosh for a few years but
currently it has Windows 8.1 on it. Processor speed requirements have not
moved much in that with two GTX 670s in SLI six years later it can still run
pretty much every game out there at max settings.

~~~
rbanffy
> but currently it has Windows 8.1 on it

You know you will have a place in hell for this. Not only ripping out the guts
of an elegant PowerPC machine to replace it with an x86 brain, but making it
run Windows... This is so wrong... ;-)

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ellisv
This just might inspire me to (finally) upgrade my MacPro 1,1.

~~~
grghk
Mine's in it's box. I can neither use it or let it go. First Xeon, 2006 I
think.

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wwweston
tl;dr: upgradeability FTW, both on price and performance.

