Mac Pro Update (sort of)

I wish I had better news for you all with this, but I've been trying to track down the cause of the Mac Pro PIO mode issues and so far I've come up empty handed. I've tried all avenues, the least successful of which has been going directly to Apple. The best I've gotten out of Apple is they are aware of the problem and are currently investigating a solution. No word on the cause or anything beyond confirmation of the problem.

I've upgraded the 2.0GHz Mac Pro I used in our review to 3.0GHz with a simple processor swap, it works just as expected and the only problems I ran into were just gaining access to the CPU sockets without gutting my hand. As user friendly as most of the case is, Apple doesn't seem to want you easily replacing CPUs. Luckily it can be done and you can buy these things from Newegg, so my recommendation is to go with slowest CPUs you can deal with today and wait for the prices on the faster ones to drop before upgrading.

Regular FB-DIMMs do work in the Mac Pro, and during normal usage you won't run into any problems. However, if you run a memory stress test (or I'm guessing if you are running a combination of applications that is very memory intensive) non-Apple modules will begin to overheat. I know Crucial is working on a revised heatsink design for their FB-DIMMs that will keep the modules cool enough in the Mac Pro, and I've been told to expect availability of those by the end of this month. I'll let you know how they turn out as soon as I get some samples in my hands. There are some other vendors that are currently shipping similar memory with the large heatsinks that seem to work fine as well, but I would stay away from any standard FB-DIMMs without more robust cooling.

Living with Rosetta on a regular basis has been fine, although I did need to upgrade the version of Dreamweaver I was using. For some reason, with Derek's X1950 XTX article Dreamweaver MX 2004 would crash if I clicked away to a different application and then switched back to Dreamweaver and tried to type in a table (without first clicking on the table cell my cursor was already in). Moving to Dreamweaver 8 fixed the problem, but be warned that Rosetta may not always play nice with your applications. Photoshop CS2 under Rosetta works just fine, but the application is clearly slower than other native applications. The easiest way to tell is to try quitting a bunch of applications in a row; all of the universal binaries quit almost instantaneously, the Rosetta apps take another second or two which ends up being quite visible. The performance impact also exists whenever you're interacting with the application and as I wrote in our Mac Pro review: it feels as if you're running 2 - 3x slower than you should be. By no means is Rosetta a deal breaker, but it's something that I want to have out of my hair as soon as possible.