Digital Alterity

Want to know how fast my new Eight-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro is? Ridiculously fast. It’s so fast that I’m going to have to change the way that I work. I’m used to only doing one thing at the time, and I’m used to setting up “big” operations like ripping a CD or encoding a DVD to run unattended while I go play a video game, read a book, or just plain go to bed. My new computer (christened “Thor”) treats such tasks as routine commonplace things that don’t even slow down other operations.

This morning, I ripped a 95-minute DVD into PSP-friendly MP4 in ten minutes. With my Powerbook, this is the sort of thing that I literally had to setup to run while I was either sleeping or away at work — easily a 10-12 hour task during which my computer was absolutely locked-up and unusable. My new Mac Pro didn’t even slow down during this ten minute frenzy of encoding. The output from top indicated that the process was just casually using 125% CPU without degrading the overall speed of the UI or any of the applications I had active.

Spotlight searches are instantaneous. For the first time, the items pop into the results in real time as I type. Leopard made an extremely noticeable performance benefit in this regard on my Powerbook, enabling me to drop Quicksilver as my app launcher of choice, but the Mac Pro is in another frame of reference entirely. Using this beast is showing me exactly how much lag I had grown used to on a daily basis, and it’s retroactively shocking.

I expected my new computer to be fast. Yes, I’m still surprised by how obscenely fast “fast” actually is, but let me assure that absolutely nothing could have prepared me for the silence that continues permeate my office. The Mac Pro is somehow no louder than my Powerbook. I’ve had towers before. I’ve built fast desktops with really nice fans. I expected a lawn mower. I was willing to trade silence for sheer computational power, but in the end, there was absolutely no compromise. Even after experiencing the silence, I expected the noise level to jump while I was transcoding that DVD. Other than the spinning of the optical drive (which was quite noticeable even on my Powerbook), there was no increase in noise.

If I had any criticism at all after five or so hours of usage, it involves the keyboard. I’m not a fan of the flat keyboard because key action just doesn’t work for me. Now I’ll admit right from the outset that I’m a notoriously cranky person when it comes to keyboards. I want my keyboard to have an oh-so-perfect delicate balance between easy to press the keys and a definite tactile response. After a couple of hours, I had shifted back over to my Apple wireless keyboard and Logitech Bluetooth mouse.

Unfortunately (and this is no reflection at all on my new computer), my Powerbook really resented being booted into Firewire target disk mode, constantly locking up and generally rendering the Setup Assistant incapable of moving my files directly over. In the end, I skipped that part of the process and then ran the stand-alone Migration Assistant using my Time Machine backups, a solution which worked quickly and flawlessly.

How thrilled am I with the new computer? On a scale of 1 to 10, I’m really effing happy. I can’t wait to get home from work again so that I can play some games on it.

Technorati Tags: Mac Pro, Mac, Apple, Review

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 9:09:40 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.