Trigger Finger

The Mac Pro is ‘Out for Delivery’ according to the TNT tracking page so that means, with luck, it should be in my sweaty anticipatory palms by this evening. In between refreshing the tracking status every five minutes I will start off this article which will cover many things.

First it will cover my experiences over time switching to Mac. It’s not like I am a OSX virgin as I have run quite a few hackintoshs which have had varying levels of success. But no matter how successful, none has ever been a 100% working install. USB ports not working on one machine, PCMCIA not working on the laptop, sound not working on another machine etc etc. So it will be the first genuine Mac experience with the proper and supported hardware. But I am hoping that if any problems do arise, that my experiences in building all these hackintoshs such as hacking kexts and tweaking EFI emulations will stand me in good stead.

Secondly it will be a review of the Mac Pro 09. The hardware is sweet on paper, but will it shorten the video encoding marathons I have had to suffer on my old Core 2 Duo? The main uses I will be putting it to in OSX world are a medium amount HD video editing using Adobe Premiere / After Effects and a LOT of Lightroom work with RAW images, along with the usual mail, web and office work. So I will report back on my experiences with applications that I already know well in Windows, but I am also going to be trying to be “Microsoft Office Free”. That means replacing Outlook with Mail, Word / Excel with ’something’, using the native OSX calendar and contact apps and so on. For word processing and spreadsheets I don’t know what I will choose to use yet, possibly iWork 09, possibly Open Office, or possibly something else. I use them so rarely at home I really just need something that is lightweight and doesn’t screw up Word documents when co-working with Office users.

Last of all I will be reporting on gaming via 64bit Windows Vista on a bootcamp partition. How easy is it to install, how is performance with some benchmarks, and of course whether there are any pitfalls to this setup.

Depending on how long winded this all gets, I may split it into three articles, but for now I will just use one. The weekend will be all about initial set-up, adding hard drives, and configuring all the must-haves and applications. Stay Tuned!

Day Zero:

Bah bad start. TNT have the laziest drivers in the world. They didn’t deliver the unit today because get this “The driver didn’t know where the place was, tried to call ONE time and got no answer so couldn’t be bothered.” Tip for Apple number one “FIRE TNT IN SWEDEN!”

Day One:

08:50 Another day of frantically refreshing the tracking page…

14:34 Still no sign… the guy hasn’t even called for directions. I can’t take it anymore!

16:30 Finally it’s here!

So I get that bad boy hooked up. Let me just say that no matter how many pictures or videos you see of the Mac Pro chassis, nothing can prepare you for how sexy it is in the flesh. It weighs an absolute ton compared to any PC I have ever built, but I tell you the chassis in both looks and design on the inside is NERD-PORN! The keyboard is very nice (and I can say great to type on). The only bad point of the initial package is the Apple Mighty Mouse, it’s laughable!

The first boot is a strange experience for a PC/Windows/Hackintosh user like me. First I got worried at the lack of any BIOS screen when I first switched on (I know I am a noob) and the immense noise of the fans on startup followed by some weird chiming sound… but a few seconds later I see OSX booting and the fans calm to almost silent. All good!

In the limited time I have, I set about throwing everything on there that I need. First stop is apple update which downloads around 12 updates for various things ranging from the newest iTunes to security updates. Reboot. Then the essentials, I set up mail (it doesn’t seem able to verify my outgoing smtp gateway but I continue anyway and it works fine). I subscribe to my Google calender in iCal, and I get the iPhone hooked up with iTunes and copy the contacts from the phone to the address book. Copy over the music, documents, pictures from my WHS backups, and install Adium for chat. I install Firefox plus foxmarks and get my bookmarks synched over (god I love foxmarks!) and install Safari 4 beta. The essential istats pro widget and the menu bar are installed so I can start watching all those lovely CPU’s doing their work. Everything is so fast so far and CPU usage has been very minimal on all cores.

So with all the essentials in place, it was onto more interesting tasks, meaning mostly things new to me. First up was adding the spare 400gb Hard Disk I had lying around, using the sliding mounts makes it super simple though I don’t know why they have to make you use such a small screwdriver. Anyway it slides smoothly in and start copying over the 200gb of RAW images and AVCHD video. Lightroom 2 installed without a problem though it would not import my Windows catalogue properly so I had to completely recreate it.

I thought I would try out iMovie 09 for quick and dirty video editing, but no matter what I do, it refuses to import my .mts files from either my hard drive or a network share. So much for ‘just works’. I read around a bit and it seems I may have some luck if I copy everything over to the Sony SR10’s hard disk and re-import from there, but that would take forever and I will skip it for now and continue to use Adobe Premiere in the meantime for those files, and try iMovie with some newer videos later on. Intrigued at this point on the other iLife packages I fire up iPhoto 09 and have a lot of fun playing with the faces feature. I have to say my wife would pretty offended by the question “is this Jessie” (our dog!) plastered over her picture. Seems like a decent little app though, and might be nice for the final bits of a workflow where I have a final jpg to catalogue and often upload to flickr.

Time was getting late, but I wanted to try out boot camp before bed. My plan was to split the disk that came with the machine (640gb) into two partitions, one for OSX and one for Vista. So using the disk utility I start by shrinking the OSX partition down to ~320gb which goes without a hitch and pretty quickly. However, I then try to create a second partition of 320gb but find a couple of problems. One I can’t choose NTFS as the format (not a big surprise) but worse, even after selecting the normal HFS filesystem and click apply, Disk Utility just sits there for well over an hour apparently “writing the partition table”. I eventually have to quit as I need to go to bed. Maybe I am doing something wrong, but I know from past experience that the disk utility is less than reliable, though I always thought the fact that I was working with hackintoshes in the past may have had something to do with it. But it seems that Disk Utility really is THAT flakey.

I squeezed in a couple more activities, I tried the uTorrent beta for mac, but it was incredibly slow, so I switched quickly back to Transmission which performed much better.

So lots more to do, but overall I am delighted with the machine. First impressions are of a screaming fast machine that I have barely woken from a sleeplike state so far. I can imagine anyone sat in front of a 2.93ghz octo must have the sensation of being at the controls of a rocket ship!

Everything has generally been so easy (compared to all the hacking I am used to doing for Hackintoshes) that it’s almost been boring! I am kinda glad to have at least a couple of problems to solve Lots of tasks for tonight, getting bootcamp working and Vista 64 installed is one, benchmarking some video encoding in OSX is another, and last but not least some nice gaming benchmarks in Windows to truly stretch the beast!

Day 2
Eagerly plunging back in to the world of Mac, I had a night of mixed success. Partly down to stupidity on my behalf and partly to stupidity on Apple’s behalf (I swear!).

Thanks to a suggestion from a user on the www.macrumors.com forum, I realised my problem with partitioning for BootCamp. It turns out that trying to be clever by partitioning in advance was the wrong way to go about things. The much simpler way is to let BootCamp partition for you. So I resized the OSX partition again so it consumed the whole disk, launched Boot Camp Assistant and realised there is a pretty little wizard with slidey bars for splitting the disk into partitions etc. Duh! Then it asks you to put the Windows disk in and at this point I realised I could not find my 64bit version of Vista.

No worries I thought, I will just burn a new one (I have a technet subscription) and I slotted a fresh DVD in the drive, launched Disk Utility and selected the ISO to burn. Now let me pause here and paint the scene a little… it’s 10pm, the house is in darkness, the 10 month old baby is asleep in a room about 4 metres away from me, and the wife is trying to get to sleep in the room 4 metres to the other side of me. This is my alone time and the whole house is silent… I think you know where I am going here… I click ‘Burn’ and Jesus H Christ that superdrive is like a full size hovercraft accelerating past the limits of it’s engines… in YOUR FACE. How the f**k can a damn DVD burner (sorry Superdrive) be so goddam f**king loud? Seriously, I cannot over-emphasise enough how loud this thrumming, whirring jet engine is. Absolutely ridiculous! I frantically click the cancel button, it supposedly cancels, but the noise doesn’t stop!!! It goes on for 10 minutes as apparently ‘cancel’ really means ‘carry the f**k on anyway and keep burning until you are finished then don’t forget to keep making noise for a further five minutes whist you close the disk’

This was only the start of the disastrous part of the evening, though the next part was my fault entirely. Looking at the DVD it seems to have written the whole DVD so I may as well use it now… I continue with the Boot Camp Assistant and start the install of Windows. The machine reboots and launches into the Vista install. But at this point it becomes clear that the DVD has not in fact burnt properly and thus Windows cannot initialise the install properly. However, I can’t get the disk out because there is no button on the drive, so every time I reboot it goes into the guaranteed-to-fail windows install again. Using my iPhone I look up how to get the disk out, and find a solution that says simply hold down the mouse button whilst booting. Nice I think and sit there holding the mouse for some time on the next boot and nothing. Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s not working with my Logitech Mouse. So there IS a useful function of that laughable mighty mouse, I plug that in and next time it works. Finally now that the disk is out I boot smoothly back into OSX.

So little success with my evening so far, I switch attention to something new as I will be damned if I am launching the hovercraft again tonight. The next little failure is I still cannot get iMovie 09 to detect my Sony SR10 HD Camcorder. Trying all kinds of solutions I eventually realise what the issue is. If you hook up the camera before launching iMovie 09 it simply mounts it as a drive, but if you launch iMovie 09 first and then hook up the camera it spots it straight away. It’s a minor success though as iMove 09 still cannot use my existing MTS files that I have already on my hard drive. It can use ones that are on the camcorder’s hardrive, so I tried copying a few files back onto the camcorder but no dice!

Never mind though, now we are back on track with the things that are good again, I try some of my older footage in Adobe Premiere. In Windows, the quality of the image in the source monitor was awful, really blocky, frequent freezes, and overall just not very nice to work with. But here in OSX it is as smooth as butter and the CPU’s are all running around the 10-15% mark throughout my trials. Excellent!

The only other thing worth mentioning (again) is how nice the keyboard is to type on. It’s like the fingers float around it and the additional USB ports are very useful for plugging in the mouse receiver on one side and maybe a memory stick on the other side, leaving the main USB ports on the Mac Pro itself free for all the other peripherals.

So tonight I WILL succeed in installing Vista 64 bit, I just need to burn the disc whilst everyone is awake, and then do some benchmarking.

Day 2 Update:
Sat at work yearning to be home with my new baby (and of course the wife and REAL baby ) so I was doing a little research, adding a lot of little things to try out tonight.

First and foremost, subscribing to my Google calendar in iCal is great… but I can’t use iCal to add events as its read only. I remembered that I set up my iPhone to connect to Google calendar using their new Exchange support, wonder if I can do the same with iCal?

Found some great apps to fill those little corners of functionality not yet covered by what I have installed:

Dropbox – I already use this on Windows, it’s excellent and I am happy to see mac support for it
Stuffit Expander – I deal with a lot of rar files so hopefully stuffit will fill this gap
Perian – For wide video codec support in quicktime
Bowtie – Nice little app for displaying itunes info
Cyberduck – Apparently the best FTP app out there for mac, we will see!
Onyx – For general tweaking

Day 3
A night of more or less unbridled success. I burnt a new copy of Vista 64 and it was definitely quieter in the SuperDrive department, though still much noisier than my old PC when burning. The installation of Vista 64bit went as smooth as silk and I am actually really impressed by the implementation of Boot Camp. Once Windows is installed and sitting at the desktop, you slip in the Mac Pro’s restore disk and install Boot Camp (is it one word or two?) and it installs all the drivers you need. It seems the new Mac Pro’s have the latest version of Boot Camp on the disk so even the 4870 card is supported without having to hunt down updates etc. Boot Camp places a little applet in the system tray which you can use to configure booting, check for updates etc. I then did the 400mb or so of windows updates and installed Steam so Empire Total War and Team Fortress 2 are downloading. I didn’t have the patience to wait for 20gb to download in one go so I will have that happen whilst I work today. So instead, I right clicked the Boot Camp applet and chose ‘Reboot into Mac OSX’

Back in OSX world I started to look at some more applications, many of those I listed yesterday, but first I tried out iWork 09. As said before, I want to be Microsoft Office free if possible, but I am less than impressed by Pages as a Word alternative. It seems like less of a Word Processor and more akin to MS Publisher. I will give it a chance, but iWork as a whole doesn’t really match my needs for something simple and lightweight (all the iWork Apps seems sluggish in loading), maybe what I really want is something like an advanced text editor (I really love Geany in Linux and Notepad++ in Windows) with the ability to edit word docs. Feel free to suggest something in the comments!

I set about a whole laundry list of little applications for various needs:

Dropbox – Simple install and very nice integration with OSX and even Growl notifications, great stuff! I have a dropbox set up also on my Windows Home Server so I can drop a torrent in dropbox from anywhere (work, or any PC in the house) and uTorrent on the WHS machine automatically picks it up and downloads it.
Stuffit Expander – Not much explanation needed, great free compression tool supporting 30ish formats.
Perian – I knew nothing about this until researching a little yesterday, but apparently this will make Quicktime much more capable in the formats it can play
Bowtie – Here I had my idiot hat on, I have no clue how to install and use it. I downloaded it and it seems like a standalone app. I tried to run it and it complained there were no themes. So I downloaded some themes and put them in correct location as BowTie started… but it doesnt seem to pick up anything I am playing in iTunes.
CyberDuck – Strange interface for an FTP client, but does have a widget for the dashboard too. At the end of the day it’s an FTP client what more is there to say
Onyx – After installing and checking through it’s various menus, it doesn’t seem that useful for 99% of time… but I am bound to screw something up at some point in the future that it can fix

Then onto a more exciting part, my first real video editing in Premiere. WOW this machine flies for encoding. Encoding a 10 minute clip to MKV @ 720p was taking 2-2.5 hours on my old machine. Here it was 17 minutes! What a difference It was only one specfic test, but this was exactly why I bought the machine so it’s nice to have the evidence at last that it was justified!

The only other thing of note is to say that I have had no crashes, no freezes as some users have experienced so it seems like I got a good unit.

Day Four – Gaming!
So taking a little break from the software side of things, it was more than time to start testing this badboy’s gaming credentials. I was a little suspicious about BootCamps ATI drivers as there was none of the control panel settings to adjust things like anti-aliasing settings and the like. So I figured I should try the latest ATI Catalyst Drivers, but not until after benchmarking the Apple provided drivers. So the only test I did was using 3dMark06 which doesn’t use DirectX10 but it is a benchmark I have used consistently for some time so I had a lot of data to compare it against from previous machines I have owned. Anyway here are the results:

Mac Pro 2009 – q2.66, 6gb DDR3, Radeon 4870 (Apple Drivers), Windows Vista 64Bit 15,075
Mac Pro 2009 – q2.66, 6gb DDR3, Radeon 4870 (ATI Drivers), Windows Vista 64Bit 14,581
My Old PC 2007 – Core 2 Duo E6600, 4GB DDR2, Geforce 9800GTX, Windows Vista 32 bit 9566
My Old PC 2005 – Athlon XP 2800+, 2GB DDR2, Nvidia Geforce 7800, Windows XP 32 bit 5638

So for DirectX9 gaming at least, the mac pro is a very respectable gaming machine indeed. Bare in mind these tests are not optimised machines in anyway… they are all generally taken after a default install of the OS, and an update of drivers. No overclocking, no stopping of applications or services, etc etc. Very vanilla. I was quite shocked to see the 500 point drop from using ATI’s latest drivers compared to Apple’s BootCamp drivers and can only put it down to some quality settings being enabled by the ATI drivers that aren’t enabled by Apple’s, though I did check things like anti-aliasing and ansiotropic filtering were disabled.

I will do some more testing with later versions of 3D mark that use DirectX10 sometime over the weekend, but this very basic snapshot gives a decent idea of the performance. The fact that it scored 50% higher than my old rig gives me a great feeling of satisfaction

But as we know synthetic benchmarks like this are far from being as scientific as their makers would belive, and it’s real world experiences that count. So I fired up Team Fortress 2, maxed every setting and enabled every feature (including the new multiprocessor support) and the spent an hour playing some very, VERY, silky-smooth multiplayer at 1680×1050 I didn’t see a single glitch or hiccup in some pretty frantic 32 player games. One thing though, the Mac keyboard is great for typing and general use but I am not sure I can hack it for gaming. The keys are too hard to find using fingertips whilst keeping the eyes on the screen mainly due to their low profile. And that tiny Return key (which is usually my frantic reload button) is very easy to miss. Still performance-wise the Mac Pro 09 was faultless as you would expect.

Then it was onto something more demanding, Empire Total War. I started with the recommended settings which were everything High, but most of the extra things like hardware shadows and volumetric fog disabled. I played some of the biggest battles I could produce and it seemed that it wasn’t even breathing heavily So I start cranking up some of the extra things, and I can say that almost everything can be enabled with more than acceptable performance (to my eyes definitely 30fps or more). The only two features I would avoid would be Hardware Shadows as they didn’t really come out right, they looked broken-up sometimes which is probably a driver problem. The other thing would be ‘Ultra’ textures, not for a performance reason, but simply and unexplainabley the ‘High’ textures looked much nicer… again probably a driver problem. I had FSAA set to 8x and Ansiotropic filtering at 8x so it’s safe to say that the Mac Pro 09 is a GREAT gaming machine, without obviously being able to compete with some crossfire or SLI setups. But it’s a tough decision about the keyboard, I love it in OSX for normal tasks, it was fine in ETW also where frantic button mashing isn’t required, but not comfortable at all to use for an FPS.

So end of Day 4 and my two big hopes for the machine are happily met. First I can happily play all the latest games at good quality settings. Secondly, video editing/encoding is fantastically fast compared to my old machine. I encoded a few videos with Toast 10 and saw very similar results to Adobe Premiere in that encoding 1920×1080 HD (.mts files) to a variety of formats is done in about 1.7 x real time generally speaking. That is LEAGUES ahead of my old machine where it was more like 10 or even 15 x real time! So I am a happy camper and looking forward to pushing the beast even further!

End of Week 1 – Conclusions

So the last few days have seen me settle down into a more ‘routine’ usage of the machine as opposed to the ‘OMG must try everything at once!!!’ phase with a new machine

I have done my first real video edits in both Adobe Premiere and iMove09. Starting with Premiere I can only repeat what I said earlier in that it’s really nice to work in a smooth environment with the source monitor and editing gliding along without hiccups or spinning hourglasses (sorry I mean beachballs!). The encoding is faster than I stated before in the latest case, encoding from 1920×1080 AVCHD to 720p .mks at high quality settings was slightly faster than real time taking 37 minutes for 38 minutes of footage! I cannot describe how pleasurable it is to work under such circumstances, whereas before it was a chore because it was so cumbersome and slow when editing, plus I wouldn’t be able to use the old computer for many hours afterwards whilst it encoded. Now not only is it quick, but I can also quite easily use the computer for other tasks during the super short encoding times. I have also had the opportunity to use some new footage in iMovie09, and I have to say it has really impressed me. I love the editing interface for fast and simple editing. It takes a few minutes only to get to grips with, and it’s very very clever indeed. It’s so simple to take what you want, throw away parts of clips you don’t want, and produce a polished looking movie at the end of it. I can imagine that for almost all of my home movie stuff I will use iMovie09 and it’s only when I want to do something more intricate that I will resort to Premiere.

I have added a few applications, Anxiety is a nice todo list that integrates with iCal, Grand Perspective for disk space monitoring, and sorry to say all alternatives to Word/Excel I have hated so far. So right now I am running Office until some magic application that is light, fast and compatible appears.  I am contemplating whether to use Parallels or VM Ware for keeping my linux distro flavour of the month in, but will probably opt for VM Ware just because I am more familiar with it. Parallels’ 3D acceleration is very interesting though, especially if I just want to run the odd game there and play with Windows 7 beta’s a little.

My first week of the full Mac experience has been a pleasure, generally speaking. I have had a lot of exposure to OSX in the past so I haven’t run into as many of the difficulties as the more typical ’switcher’ might. The performance of the machine has been stellar on all fronts, and as more and more benchmarks drip through from other sources it seems that, for my usage, the quad was definitely the right choice. The higher clock speeds translate into much more usable power for me than a double the number of 2.26 cores. I suppose there are some things I don’t like such as the thunderous superdrive, but I burn maybe one disk a month. I have been having so much fun ‘doing stuff’ with my music in the background and the machine just floating along with barely a hiccup that I haven’t booted into Windows the whole week apart from to get Vista installed and do the gaming tests… that’s a good sign!

I’ll wrap up here for now, if I find anything of note I will update this post, but feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best answer them. But overall I can’t recommend the machine highly enough, there is nothing that I ‘can’t do’ and do it fast as hell!

9.5/10!

Related posts:

1. Can a Mac Pro Pay for Itself?