PowerMax has photos of the new Mac Pro being taken apart. You know you want to look.

Does this mean if you buy extra ram you have to buy heat sinks too?

Yeah, in the Apple Store it says:

"Please note: Apple created a more robust thermal specification for the Mac Pro FB-DIMM heat sinks that provide more efficient cooling than many other FB-DIMMs. These FB-DIMMs require less airflow to stay cool and allow the internal fans to spin at slower speeds, improving system acoustics. FB-DIMMs made by other manufacturers that do not include a sufficient heat sink may cause the fans to run faster (and louder) or the memory chips to run slower so as not to overheat."

When you have spend 2500 bucks for a Mac Pro the outlay for a little cheapo heatsink to cool your DIMMS won´t hurt you.

Something tells me the PC's best known brands will bring out well designed cooling systems just for the ram in these towers. I for one would opt for a Zalman product over Thermaltake or Antec just because of my experiences with Zalman being grade A.

There's a close-up of one of the RAM riser cards in the Mac Pro. This thing has tons of huge heatsinks on everything, but they still managed to design everything in a way that there's space for upgrades. It all fits together like stacked bricks. It's interfitted almost as tightly as a Mac Mini, yet this thing isn't small at all. Unlike most computers that have a lot of space inbetween components for air flow, this thing is literally one solid block of computer fury. o_o

I'm sold.

Wow... I would have liked the pictures that were showing the size of the heat sink not to be slanted... it was really hard getting a good estimate with out depth perseption... same goes with the the picture with the fries box.

But i can't complain I didn't speand\risk $2500 to get pictures of a computers insides.

Yay! Mac Pro goodness!

wow!!! they really meant the phrase, its available today... i been building pc on tower casing, this beast beats them all.. nice enclosure and parts layout inside.. got to buy lotto tickets NOW...

I think it's bad that RAM needs heat sinks, and we'll be forced to pay extra for heat sinked RAM.

It's only a matter of time before all ram will need heat sinks... it wasn't too long ago when video cards didn't have heat sinks or fans... it also wasn't that long ago when cpus had crappy heat sinks without fans... More and more computer parts will need heat sinks as time goes on... it is just a fact of life.

Hey Mash I had posted it before you did!

http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=24050

lol

The Mac Pro service manual has now been torrented at MTKA (and perhaps elsewhere).

Yeah...I got that a couple days ago. Lot's of pretty pictures within. The blow-up part deconstruction is nice as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtaeM1T4ZRg...Ephp%3Fpage%3D2

There's a video of it all fiting together. Gotta hand it Apple - they have the prettiest insides of anyone on the market.

Bah, give me some hacked together whitebox any day! I can save cash!!!

Has anyone tried sticking a standard video card into a Mac Pro?

Good question because them having a 7300 standard and not a 7900 is insane, it's not even available. GOOFY

But how does it overclock? =)

The design of the Mac Pro is pretty impressive, both electronically and physically. It's great that they designed the drive trays to avoid the need for data cables. Many PCs have airflow problems from the mess of cables all over. If one needs to install an ATA drive from an old machine, it looks like it could be put in the slot for the second optical drive bay, using those brackets I used to see in PCs to adapt 3.5" drives to a 5.25" mounting. When I heard they were using DDR2 667 RAM I thought to myself... gee, they must have cut corners not using DDR2 800. But then I read that it was buffered (much more reliable signals when a number of modules are added), ECC (the hardware can detect and sometimes correct memory errors - no more wondering if bad RAM is going to cause crashes), and 256 bits - FOUR CHANNELS WIDE! That effectively increases performance far beyond what two-channel DDR2 800 memory would have provided. It does mean that for maximum performance memory should be installed in sets of four.

If the memory provides feedback to the fan controller about temperature of the RAM, It was thoughtful indeed for Apple to have specified a particular more efficient heatsink design (size and orientation chosen based on actual conditions). Use of the recommended type will run at full speed with the minimum amount of fan noise, making the system quieter than it would be with other memory. As usual, Apple is paying attention to details other PC vendors don't bother with.

When I saw this thread mentioning deconstruction I was hoping that someone had taken note of all the chips in the machine to provide some insight as to what is supported by the OS (which might have some added drivers in the version shipped for some of them).

I was on the same page as you are a couple years ago and always bought the graphics card (my beloved hercules 9700) or the motherboard that looked the part and organized all cables so neatly etc... until I realized that I don't have a windowed side panel on my case and it didn't make a difference after all. So I agree with cyrana on this topic, make it dull, make it beige (j/k) and make it cheap so I can spend more money on better hardware. I can't imagine the ordinary Apple user to open that case panel more than twice during the Macs lifetime though so all that beauty might sadly stand unappreciated by many people who actually buy these machines. I would open the case once every day for the first couple months at least if I were to own one thats for sure, show it to friends etc...

Ars also has a bit on this:
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macpro.ars

However, as always, they left Beam Sync enabled and then wonder why xbench is slower. They are really dense. (Every single Intel Mac review does the same thing there)

No Photoshop till next year? I guess I will have to wait for Adobe before getting one of these new Mac Pro.
Any thoughts on this issue?
PS CS2 runns very well on a 64bit AMD ayatem with 4 gigs of ram and Windows XP64.

Thats a good price, building a Hackintosh Pro couldn't possibly be cheaper could it? Well done Mr Jobs, thats a sweet design mate.

Unless a hackintosh is £1000 cheaper, I'm sold, would save me all that drama of driver issues....

This is interesting news:

"...All four bays have carriers installed; in the case of my Mac Pro, only the first was occupied with a hard drive. You can order your Mac Pro with up to four 500GB SATA-II hard drives, but that gets expensive very quickly. I ordered a pair of 500GB Maxtors and dropped them right in there. Installation is very simple: you pull out the carrier, lay it on top of the hard drive, attach the drive with the four screws already in the carrier, and slide it into the Mac Pro. The first drive took me about 90 seconds to install, and the second about 30 seconds. Very easy, and they both showed up when I powered on the tower...."

So it supports any brand of Hard Disks, (not apple ebranded only)

Nice how about any kind of videocard ? That would really be nice!!

from what I've read, installing a separate video card results in Mac OS X not seeing the card while XP under Boot Camp will load the card just fine. According to an Apple engineer, this is a firmware issue due to the Mac Pro using EFI instead of BIOS.

interesting, so if they plan to really support Boot camp, efi and video card firmwares gonna be a problem...

doesn't the stock video card driver from nVidia work in Boot Camp for Mac Pro's? Also, Apple can always release updated video card drivers for Boot Camp or they could ask ATI (AMD) and nVidia to publish special Boot Camp versions of their drivers. Also, most people running Boot Camp will only use it for an occasional game or Windows only application, so having outdated driver won't be as much of an issue.