My MacPro 3.33GHz Hexacore Less than an Hour’s Drive Away

UPDATE! Driving over to FedEx to pick up, right now!

My Mac Pro Westmere hexacore 3.33GHz is now a 20 minute drive away. Does that mean it might show up today? Or sit in the FedEx warehouse until Monday? It’s not showing “on vehicle for delivery”, and last time I tried to pick up such a thing, I was told there had to be one failed delivery attempt first.

Shipping status — en route

What I ordered

Shown at right is the configuration that I ordered. It is the configuration I recommend for upgrading to the MPG Pro Workstation—no extras, just the basics (except for video card). The 2.8GHz and 3.2GHz models are also good choices, see this page for more on buying tips.

I am NOT necessarily recommending the Radeon 5870 over the Radeon 5770, but I ordered one for testing purposes.

I will probably revert to the 5770, or oven the old NVidia GT120, simply for power consumption reasons (and noise).

I have no desire to burn 100-300 more watts for no speed gain (I’ll test the actual power consumption).

Test medley

I’ll be testing the new 3.33GHz hexacore Mac Pro against:

3.33GHz quad-core Mac Pro Nehalem (as an MPG Pro Workstation)
2.93Ghz 8-core Mac Pro Nehalem (as an MPG Pro Workstation);
Mac Pro MPG Hot Rod (if feasible)
MPG Pro One souped-up iMac

My standard configs will be 24GB memory for the 4-slot Mac Pros, and 48GB for the 8/12 cores. All with dual 200GB RAID-0 stripe SSDs— let ’em do their best!