My Mac Pro Experience (coming from PowerBook)

Question

Hey All, I recently bought Apple's new power horse, and I thought I'd share my initial experience using it.
A little background
For the last few years I've been using a PowerBook G4 as my primary computer. I was about to buy a PowerMac when Apple made the announcement that they were going Intel, so I decided to put off a new computer purchase until they came out with the Intel-based PowerMac. When they finally came out with the machine a couple weeks ago, at first I was going to wait a month or two, giving time for any first-rev issues to surface. But turns out that's a lot easier said than done--on Saturday, after Flash froze up on me for the 3rd time that day, I ran to the Apple Store to get my Mac Pro.
Usage
I got the standard configuration and have since added a 160gb HDD for Windows from NewEgg and a another gb of memory from Crucial. Looking forward the plan is to go up to 4gb of memory, get ATI's Radeon X1900 XT when the Mac edition comes out, and grab a 500gb backup HDD.
To migrate my data over, I decided not to use the Migration Assistant as I didn't want to move any preferences or system files for apps I've uninstalled, etc.. So instead I just hooked up an ethernet cable between the computers. First I moved my apps, then my email, then my iTunes libraray, then all other files in my Desktop, Documents, Music, Photos, and Sites. I was already using .Mac syncing for my Bookmarks, Calendars, Contacts and Keychains, so that part was easy-- just enabled syncing.
Coming from a PowerBook, this thing is ridiculously fast. All these little things that took several seconds to load on my PowerBook are now instantaneous (loading Dashboard widgets for the first time after boot, for example). I have not noticed a performance hit running non-universal apps under Rosetta, however before I got more memory, the system's memory usage would almost max out when I was using Photoshop, so that extra 1GB definitely makes a difference there. One thing that's exciting about this computer is knowing it's only going to get faster as more applications become universal, Mac OS X Leopard comes out and has better 64-bit support, and as I add more RAM.
It's also very quiet. The new Xeons don't run very hot, and with the aid of a heatsink that spans the entire width of the machine on top of it, the fans are barely audible. The loudest part about it is the hard drive.
Boot Camp installation was just as easy as all the articles say. Windows runs pretty well on it– it lasted a full hour before crashing! I installed a program called MacDrive (www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive6) that enables Windows to access Mac-formatted hard drives. One thing that's worth a mention about MacDrive is that you have the option of making those drives read-only, so if I get some crazy worm or virus or whatever, it won't stand a chance corrupting any of my important data on the OS X drive.
But the main reason I installed Windows was for the games. While I was sleeping I had Steam download and install Half-Life 2. This morning I opened it up to check the performance. It's not bad at all–-with a 1680x1050 resolution (native 20" Cinema Display res), the recommended video settings were as follows:
- model detail: high
- texture detail: high
- shader detail: high
- water detail: reflect world (of options: basic reflection, reflect world, reflect all)
- shadow dtail: high
- color correction - disabled
- antialiasing mode: none (of options: none, 2x, 4x, 8x)
- filtering mode: trilinear (of options: bilinear, trilinear, anisotropic 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x)
- wait for vertical sync: disabled
- high dynamic range - full
The high dynamic range capability is particularly exciting to me because my gaming pc crashed every time I tried playing The Lost Coast, Valve's high dynamic range demo level. So, not bad at all.
Annoyances
Big thing here is the lack of the wireless module. Unless I want to span a cable across my room, I need wireless internet. A temporary solution to this is I have my PowerBook sharing its wireless connection with the Mac Pro over ethernet.
Not all Mac applications work on it yet, due to the x86 64-bit architecture. So far the programs I have tried to run that won't include Parallels (basically a VirtualPC for Intel Macs), Cisco VPN Client, and MySQL Administrator. The iStat Pro widget is also acting up.
On the Windows side, there are several things Apple could improve on. The biggest one here is the Eject key-- it will only open, but not close, the cd tray. If you have two optical drives installed, it will open both of them together (whereas on OS X it opens/closes the top one, and ALT+Eject opens/closes the bottom one).
With the exception of these minor inconveniences (which probably won't even be around a month from now) my experience has been completely positive. The only time I've had any sort of trouble was when I tried accessing a mounted drive that was no longer physically connected, forcing me to relaunch Finder, but this is a well-known issue that has nothing to do with the specific machine.
If you're thinking about getting a Mac Pro, my advice is to go for it.
- Brandon
Mac Pro   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

[iIt's good to finally read something positive in these MacPro discussions.
Bear in mind that this is a technical support forum where users get help for their technical issues rather than a "feel good about your purchase" forum.
As for the Mac Pro itself, from what I've seen it's a extremely stable system and relatively problem-free system. You might want to have a look in the MacBook forums for a comparison of the number of recurring issues. Only then will you appreciate how good the Mac Pro is.