Take Your Mac Pro Eight Ways

You know what they say, if four is good, eight must be better. MacBidouille has a nicely detailed tutorial on replacing your Mac Pro's stock Dual Core Xeons with Intel's new Quad Core Xeon X5355, bringing your up to eight total cores. Needless to say, you'll be kissing your Apple warranty goodbye if you perform this kind of brain surgery, and some earlier tests from AnandTech even indicated you won't necessarily gain in performance (since software has to be optimized to use multiple cores effectively). Nonetheless, if you're the type that just must have the biggest, baddest Mac beast out there you should start looking for a long hexagonal screwdriver.

Personally, I think I would just wait until Apple gets around to doing this for me in some future Mac Pro, but I think it's great that's this sort of thing possible.

[Via Digg]

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Source: http://www.hardmac.com/articles/70/

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You know what they say, if four is good, eight must be better. MacBidouille has a nicely detailed tutorial on replacing your Mac Pro's...

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Fredster

Mmmm, 8 cores, it's like a wet dream...!:) Me want!!!

February 13 2007 at 2:58 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Benson Leung

Carl : Mac OS X has had support for multiple processors from the very first version.

Leopard won't be required to use 2, 4, or 8 processors. Tiger works fine with current quad core Xeon based Mac Pros, and all of the Core Duos and Core 2 Duos work just fine.

If you read the article, 8 processors shows up just fine in Mac OS X when you install two of these Xeons quad core chips.

February 13 2007 at 1:42 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

donovan

AnandTech's article indeed says it all. 65% boost in performance with Cinebench. That beats a secondary MacPro using Net Render no problem since Net Render only works with multi-frame renders (animation) of which I do none. I just want my render times reduced on still imagery.

February 13 2007 at 9:25 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Carl

Does anyone know if Leopard is planned (known?) to provide support for multiple processors? Will these 8 processor machines SCREAM with Leopard? Will my Dual Core Duo Macbook get noticeably faster when I upgrade to Leopard?

February 13 2007 at 2:20 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

thecompkid

Replacing a CPU is one of the easiest things you can do if you know what you're doing, so the tutorial should be deleted. It will give wanna-be nerds the confidence to dive in way over their heads, but it won't give them the ladder to climb back out.

February 12 2007 at 9:27 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

john russell

With that kind of money, you could just buy another Mac and hook it up, Xgrid style.

February 12 2007 at 9:18 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kendall Tawes

My cousin works for Intel and got some of those four core Xeons along with a mother board. It's doing very little to improve the speeds of anything so far for him. He would never bought them now but when their free you know you want them.

February 12 2007 at 8:39 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Rod

If you actually need a tutorial to replace a CPU, you have no business screwing around and voiding your warranty that you paid good money for. It's not for the faint of heart.

Besides, right now two quadcore's will cost as much as the Mac Pro did originally. Not worth it until they drop in price anyway.

February 12 2007 at 8:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply