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Hit 7 - Apple Mac Pro MA970LL/A Desktop (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, 16x SuperDrive)
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List Price: $2,799.00
Our Price: $3,099.83
Availability: N/A
Manufacturer: Apple Computer
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Personal Computers
Brand: Apple
CPU Manufacturer: Intel
CPU Speed: 2.8
CPU Type: Intel Pentium II Xeon
EAN: 0718908999318
Feature: Two 2.8 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses
Hard Disk Size: 320
Label: Apple Computer
Manufacturer: Apple Computer
Model: MA970LL/A
Processor Count: 8
Publisher: Apple Computer
Studio: Apple Computer
System Memory Size: 2000
System Memory Type: DDR2 SDRAM
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Features
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Two 2.8 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses
2 GB RAM expandable up to 32 GB, 320 GB hard drive, 16x Double-Layer SuperDrive
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB (Two dual-link DVI)
Two FireWire 800 ports, two FireWire 400 ports, five USB 2.0 ports, and two USB 2.0 ports on keyboard
Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard (includes Time Machine, Quick Look, Spaces, Spotlight, Dashboard, Mail, iChat, Safari, Address Book, QuickTime, iCal, DVD Player, Photo Booth, Front Row, Xcode Developer Tools), iLife '08 (includes iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand)
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Editorial Reviews:
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Start your engines, all eight of them. Eight-core processing power was once only top-of-the-line. Now it comes standard. This time around, performance is more phenomenal than ever - up to two times faster than the previous standard-configuration Mac Pro. And with the multi-core technology enhancements of Mac OS X Leopard, the new Mac Pro is a force to be reckoned with. For what ever your working on, either Photoshop or Final Cut Pro enjoy up to 1.8 times faster processing power with this new Mac Pro. All-new high-performance graphics cards from ATI make Mac Pro graphics technology even more cutting edge. ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and two dual-link DVI ports - provides great performance for typical creative applications. The Mac Pro has four 3.5-inch internal hard drive bays that allows for an enormous amount of internal storage, up to 4TB. These bays are direct-attach and cable free, just attach the drive carrier to a Serial ATA hard drive and slide the drive into place. Another smart design allows you to install more memory in a snap. Mac Pro has two memory riser cards with four fully buffered DIMM slots each. Just slide out the riser cards and snap in the memory. With a total of eight DIMM slots available, you can install up to 32GB of 800MHz ECC DIMM memory. If you're looking for a powerful and a sweet looking desktop this is the one for you. ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB GDDR3 video memory SuperDrive with double-layer support Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR Two independent 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet Front ports - FireWire 800, FireWire 400, 2 USB, Headphone minijack and speaker Back ports - FireWire 800, FireWire 400, 3 USB, Optical Digital Audio In/Out TOSLINK ports, Stereo line-level input/output, 2 RJ-45, 2 DVI ports Expansion slots - 2 PCI Express x4, 1 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Drive bays - One open optical drive bay for optional second SuperDrive, 4 internal 3.5 Mo
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: MacPro has Firewire Problems
Comment: Apple Mac Pro MA970LL/A Desktop (Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, 16x SuperDrive)
This is a rather long review and if you are not a big time firewire drive user I have made a brief synopses of this review in the first two paragraphs. Note that this computer was purchased the first of January 2009. I have delayed writing this review to give Apple every chance to come clean about the FW problem.
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The three star rating is primarily due to the inability of apple to deliver on its promise of reliable FW 800 performance on the MacPro or the Macbook computers and their lack of responsiveness when confronted with an actual user that wants and needs to mount many FW disks.
The other contributor to the 3 star rating has to do with the speed of the MacPro. While Photoshop and Lightroom are much more responsive than my MacMini (1.5 GHz G4), I would expect an 8 core (2 x 2.8 GHz Intel Xenon) to literally blow the doors off the MacMini. The other applications that I use are also faster, but not dramatically so.
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I purchased this high performance MacPro Tower because my MacMini and Macbook Pro 15 were beginning to show signs that the large digital photo files that I work with were a little too much, particularly on the MacMini. The MacMini is an earlier G4 model. Also, Photoshop CS4 is optimized for Intel. I also use Adobe Lightroom to manage my large database of digital photographs, currently approaching 40,000 files.
Since I do not trust hard drives and I am disinclined to spend hours creating DVD archive disks, I maintain many, many firewire drives to archive and backup my photographic library. I copy each CF card that I use when shooting photographs to no less than 4 separate hard drives before deleting the files from the cards. I use Lexar Professional CF cards exclusively.
As FW 800 drives came available I have been buying the triple interface Maxtor III drives expecting to use them in FW 800 mode when I finally upgraded my MacMini with a new tower computer. I have 12 of these drives including 2 500 GB, 6 300 GB, and 4 2 TB devices. I have been using these drives without problem on my MacMini as I purchased them without issues. Of course the initial drive of that chain had to attach through the FW 400 port of the MacMini because the G4 MacMini does not have a FW 800 port.
When the MacPro came in I naturally wanted to move these drives to the MacPro and leave the FW 400 drives attached to the MacMini. I have another 16 or so FW 400 drives that I have acquired over the last several years.
Unfortunately, the FW 800 implementation seems to be flawed. If I try to mount several FW 800 drives, at some point, the FW 800 chain appears to get `confused' and the drives spontaneously unmount. This means that I cannot mount all of my drives at the same time. Typically I can only mount 5 or 6 drives before I experience problems. Worse still, I have experienced file corruption when copying photo files from either my FW 400 or my FW 800 CF card reader. I have since spoken with another photographer (another long time Mac user) and he said that he had the same problem with trying to mount multiple drives. His work-around is to only use one FW 800 drive at a time.
In addition to the FW 800 problem, the FW 400 ports also seem to have problems with using multiple drives simultaneously. On my MacMini and on my Macbook Pro I have mounted nearly every drive that I own (more than 30 firewire drives) using the FW 400 port. The FW 800 drives are connected with each other via the FW 800 ports and with the rest of the chain via a FW 400 port on the triple interface drives. This is how the drives were used prior to the MacPro purchase.
Interestingly, when I tried to mount several FW 800 drives to the Macbook Pro; it too would lose the chain at some point.
I called apple support a couple of times concerning this problem. The techs on the phone suggested zapping the pram, etc., which I did to no avail. The last call was escalated to a higher level in the support and was subsequently turned over to the hardware folks. I was assured I would receive a telephone call and an email with some information concerning the Firewire problem, but after a week I had no futher response. Fortunately, I had sent some screen shots to the tech at apple, so I had an email address. When I emailed a reminder, he finally sent (forwarded) the email that he received from the hardware folks.
To make a long story short, apple blew me off saying that there was something wrong with my drives, etc. I replied that I wanted information concerning the FW 800 testing that apple did to verify that FW 800 could mount 63 drives, since I couldn't get it to mount 6 drives reliably. All I received in reply was silence.
I spent many, many hours testing the MacPro, the MacMini, and the Macbook using various combinations of FW drives, FW card readers and USB 2.0 card readers. I worked on this problem on a regular basis for nearly 3 months. I offered apple to be a beta tester for their FW issues since I do have so many devices and apparently, apple has never tested their own interface to anywhere close to its limits.
The three star rating is primarily due to the inability of apple to deliver on its promise of reliable FW 800 performance on the MacPro or the Macbook computers and their lack of responsiveness when confronted with an actual user that wants and needs to mount many FW disks.
While I was able to successfully use the Macbook with many FW 400 drives (including the FW 800 drives when the FW 800 chain was initially connected via FW 400), I was never able to repeat this with the MacPro computer using the FW 400 ports. I also had to abandon using the FW card readers and revert to the USB 2.0 reader to eliminate corrupted files during transfer to the MacPro computer. Furthermore, I now only use the MacPro internal drives (4) and one (at-a-time) FW 800 drives for my photography. The digital archiving with the addition copies had to return to the MacMini.
The other contributor to the 3 star rating has to do with the speed of the MacPro. While Photoshop and Lightroom are much more responsive than my MacMini (1.5 GHz G4), I would expect an 8 core (2 x 2.8 GHz Intel Xenon) to literally blow the doors off the MacMini. The other applications that I use are also faster, but not dramatically so.
I have been a Macintosh user since the 512k Fat Mac. I have evolved through the LC, the IIci, S900 (clone), iMac, Power Mac G4, Powerbook, and finally the MacMini on the AIM chips to the Intel based Macbook and Mac Pro. In all these prior computers, I have never had a problem with apple or their computers till now. I have also used Intel PCs and Sun workstations at work (reluctantly in the case of the Windows PCs.). I am not an apple basher nor a PC basher, but at this point, I could not recommend a Macintosh computer to anyone that required a lot of drive space that needed to be online. I have in excess of 15 TB of FW storage that I cannot safely use with my most recent computer.
So, if you like apple hardware and you don't stress the firewire ports, this is a good machine. If you have a large investment in firewire drives, I would recommend that you keep what you have. Since most PCs don't come with firewire ports that would mean: Keep your old Mac and bug apple to get the bugs out of firewire 800. I understand that the new Macbooks don't come with FW 400 ports, so I would be careful there, as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Extra power?
Comment: What does a Mac need extra power for, it runs only OS X and cannot run games or next to nothing releated to extreme graphics. Dell's power PC's are faster, more powerful and cheeper than this anyway. 3000$ give me a break Apple.
Customer Rating:
Summary: MAC
Comment: Ok this is my second MAC I had bought a MAC Mini for my first MAC.. I'm a old PC user but after the purchase of the MAC Pro I could not be happier as the MAC allows me to run virtuals as well as the MAC OS and have not gotten a virus and very happy with the product. Suggest Vmware for virtuals if you a PC person and thinking about switching use VMWare to load XP / server 2003 / Server 2008 / Win 7 / as well Linux
Since receiving the my order I have gone to OWC for more memory and this MAC is a screamer.. I do 3D art and a normal PC can take three to four hours to render the picture but not the MAC Pro 20min at most.
Also Amazon delivered on-time like normal as well the box and all equipment was in a excellent condition. Thank you Amazon..
Customer Rating:
Summary: The positive reviews are not hype.
Comment: This is a great machine. Personally I use my Mac Pro for Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio, Shake, Aperture and Adobe CS3.
No need to repeat what has already been said.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Comment: Apple's latest workstation is a marvel of engineering and art. It combines elegance and power in a way that is unobtrusive and stark. The system has mad amounts of power and yet is quiet and minimalist at it's heart.
If I had any quibble with it, it would be using PATA bus interfaces for the optical drives. There are internal SATA ports that can be used for optical drives, but a number of vendors sell external cable adapters that let you add two eSATA devices easily (the installation is not that scary and you don't have to get near the CPUs doing it). I have six devices attached yielding 3.3Tb of storage -- all at SATA speeds.
Simply the best!
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