Everyone Deserves a PC Like this One

[Soopafresh]

8 Core Mac Pro Running Windows. And no, I don't own it

[guns1inger]

It is actually a reasonably priced powerhouse. Unfortunately there is no software for the Mac that would even put it into a sweat. retails out here for AUD$3999.00 (sans monitor, or course). Put windows on it and you could really get some good stuff out of it.

[raffie]

What the hell are you doing using 66% of those 8 cores?

[guns1inger]

Downloading porn - what else would a person do with a machine like that ?

[racer-x]

That should have just about enough power to edit AVCHD natively................

I wouldn't mind having one.

[Soopafresh]

What the hell are you doing using 66% of those 8 cores?

Just clicking on a few drives in Vista.....

[videobread]

Guess I'm living in the past. Just bought my fourth HP xw4100 workstation on ebay. It has a P4 3.2, 2 gig of PC3200 RAM 400, 74 gig WD 10,000 rpm Raptor, Adaptec SCSI controller, XP Pro COA, an HP 8x burner and best of all an Nvidia Quadro FX3000 all for $304. All the part are HP. I put two Pioneer 112's in them and use them to burn DVD's. I run multiple R220's.
I would love to have a newer system, but the dollars don't add up. Cost/benefit does not work. When Microsoft stops supporting XP I will go Linux before being forced to go Vista. The Wintel monopoloy is over for me.

[Soopafresh]

That Nvidia card is worth close to a grand. Well done!

[JohnnyMalaria]

What the hell are you doing using 66% of those 8 cores?

Trying to run Windows XP on a non-certified Mac

[thevoelk]

I just got one of them at work, 8 GB RAM and 2 TB of hard drive space, with a fairly nice X1900 video card. I have to admit, the encoding speeds I get are amazing. Too bad only 3GB of RAM are recognized.

[Soopafresh]

What settings did you modify in the boot.ini to get it to see 3GB ? /3GB ? What about /PAE

[redwudz]

If it's a 32 bit OS, AFAIK, it will only see a little more than 3GB RAM. A 64 bit OS can use quite a bit more.

[Soopafresh]

Here's the best I've been able to get -

[JohnnyMalaria]

The shortfall is due to memory address space allocated to hardware devices that use memory-mapped I/O. If you look at a device's resources (in Control Panel), often you will see memory address space being used. When you have less than 4GB installed, you won't see the same behavior since the hardware can still use the same memory space for I/O. Well, you may see the same behavior if some hardware chomps through a lot of memory address space (e.g., graphics cards that use some of the system RAM).

Years ago when even 8MB RAM was an expensive luxury (must be showing my age!), this issue didn't arise. Now that RAM is so affordable, we can install enough RAM to cover the entire 32-bit address space.

This thread is interesting:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1272502&SiteID=17

[redwudz]

The 32 bit OS memory limitation is interesting.

What I find as strange is that 64 bit or even 128 bit OSs are not more common. The only foray into 64 bit that I have done is XP 64. And I found major limitations for available programs and drivers. That was a year or two ago. The situation may have changed now.

That's one reason I didn't want to try Vista 64.

Really, if the drivers and the programs are available for most of my video needs, I would go with a 64 bit OS immediately. And install a few more GB of memory. All my CPUs are now 64bit. It seems a waste not to utilize their full capabilities.

Any thoughts on this?

And not to get off the OPs topic. I have seen the benefits of dual core. Quad core or better should be an another improvement. Of course, that would somewhat depend on the programs used. I'm mostly thinking of encoding as that's the most CPU intensive operation for me.

[thevoelk]

As I said, only 3GB are recognized. Once Boot Camp is out of beta, hopefully Apple will support XP x64 and Vista 64. To be honest, I know very little about Apples, in relation to Windows, so I don't even know if OS X is even utilizing all 8GB. It's detected, so I'm assuming it does. Work wouldn't go for it, but I actually wanted less RAM and a Blu-Ray drive. I don't think it was an option at the time, and may not be yet, not to mention the money that bought it was "use it or lose it" so we got to go all out. Too bad the monitors were back-ordered, I should get them next week. 2 nice 30" screens.

[ssj2_goha]

OSX is a 64bit os so yeah it does recognize all the memory (technically you can put 32GB of ram in the mac pro)

[Soopafresh]

And not to get off the OPs topic. I have seen the benefits of dual core. Quad core or better should be an another improvement. Of course, that would somewhat depend on the programs used. I'm mostly thinking of encoding as that's the most CPU intensive operation for me.

CPU performance, especially L2 cache size, makes the biggest difference in encoding speed. That's another area where the Intel E6xxx series really shine.

JohnnyM's link to the Vista 64 thread was interesting - looks like it was difficult for machines to see above 4GB as well.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Agree with redwudz about the 64-bit bit.

XP Pro x64 is a great OS - a remarkable performer. It isn't just the 32-bit version compiled for 64-bit. Its lineage is totally different - its derived from the 64-bit Windows Server 2003, with all the server bits removed. Not sure if Vista is the same - somehow I doubt it. Well, Vista Server (i.e., Longhorn) doesn't even exist in a final form!

The L2 cache point is interesting, too. Back in the days of the Pentium II, it had an L2 cache - about 256K I think. The Celeron version of the chip didn't have an L2 cache which made it cheaper. But, for multimedia apps (e.g., Premiere 4.0), it made no difference - the performance was the same (actually slightly better with the Celeron). Only apps dealing with small amounts of data at a same suffered (like Word, Outlook etc). The Celeron was also very easy to overclock.

With today's L2 caches being a few MB, the benefits are definitely there. If the typical size of data being crunched exceeds a few MB, then it will lose its advantages. But that would have to be some serious uncompressed high def stuff.