Mac Pro users reporting performance hit linked to audio use

These things are always hard to quantify. But my 8-core Mac Pro seems to have much, much more trouble with audio rendering than it does with extremely complex and high def video rendering in Final Cut Pro and other editing suites. It drives me NUTS.

Hmm, I still haven't seen this issue with mine. I bought it a month or so after the early 2009 MacPro came out in March'09. Is this bug affecting all machines from early'09 or is it showing up in the later models in 2009? The article says Oct'09, which I believe would be wrong since Apple released the Nehalem MacPros in March'09.

It's definitely not from the recent iTunes update. These problems have been going on since at least October, that is when the MacRumors post was created. It now has over 1000 posts in that thread alone. Playing 256 kbps music through iTunes only increases my Early 2008 2.4 GHz MacBook CPU temperatures 1-2 degrees Celsius at most. Clearly, performance hits should not occur when using iTunes.

Dang, I lucked out getting a 2008 Mac Pro.

Can't really say anything about performance but iTunes does cause my Mac Pro Quad-core (2009) to go from 38°C (100°F) to 55°C (131°F) in about 10 minutes, ambient temperature reading is about 28°C (82°F)... CPU readings are about 96% idle on average. When I pause an iTunes song, it immediately starts dropping to the original temperature of 38°C in less than 3 minutes.

I'm not really concerned about these temps as they are far from the critical point and my fans didn't even spin up so there's still a large margin.

I actually never paid any attention to this, I'm not sure if this "problem" has already existed since the inception of the machine or that it only manifested itself until recently. Anyway, I can find references to this as early as november 2009, so I doubt it's the EFI update...

If I'm billing serious money with a computer where performance is important, it becomes a "workstation" with only the essentials installed. Run the other stuff on a second device.

"This is my rifle, this is my gun. One is for killing, the other's for fun."

I doubt this happens on Mac only.

On my 3Ghz Core 2 Extreme + 8GB ram, just by opening up the iTunes it inceased my CPU temp by 17'C... not even playing any songs!

iTunes takes awhile to start even on my PC. I don't like that Apple has changed it around to give it more of a Windows look and feel. I suppose that is the core audience, however.

And to think that my Hackintosh 10v doesn't have this problem. :)