[geeks] nVidia 8800GT for Apple Mac Pro

[Shannon Hendrix]

On May 21, 2008, at 13:14 , Bill Bradford wrote:

> On Wed, May 21, 2008 at 11:50:41AM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>>> To be utterly honest I found the GeForce 7300 GT to be fairly  
>>> adequate for
>>> most stuff in OS X,
>> It was OK except for a few things.  I found it got bogged down with  
>> a lot
>> of windows and a lot of system load, while the 8800 doesn't even  
>> notice.
>
> Am I weird that the onboard GMA950 graphics in the Mini are fine for
> everything *I* do?  It's most all "2D" (web, terminal windows, and so
> forth) though.  Anything requiring hardcore 3D is games, and I have a
> Windows box for that.

Maybe, I don't know.

My normal daily setup won't even load on a maxed out Mini, so we  
obviously have different needs.

I was going to get a Mini last year, but when I loaded up several  
applications, I found the GUI stuttered a lot when using it, and that  
bothered me.  Of course, the store unit only had 2GB of RAM, but it  
seemed to me the graphics were pretty slow.

Of course, that was early in 2007 and there have been new Minis since  
then which are nicer.

I would actually like to have one, but not for my normal work, just  
lighter duty in a place where there is no room or need for a big  
machine.

> I'm a heavy Spaces user but it works just fine..

It's not how heavily you use Spaces, but how much is running on your  
machine.

With 8 spaces loaded with apps, I found Spaces was really jerky  
sometimes even on a Mac Pro.

I generally try to turn things off as I stop using them, but sometimes  
I might be needing to use several heavy apps at once, so it can get  
bogged down.

The worst offender is VMware, which eats a lot more memory than you  
specify for the VMs themselves.

I do embedded work on VMware, and it isn't uncommon for me to have  
three VMs running at once.


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com