Notes on Kona LSe and SATA PCIe Card slot config/setup with 2008 Mac Pros vs Earlier Models (from 4/18/2008 news page)

Mac Pro - different versions, different card configuration - expansion slot utility
Hi Mike, I am about to start switching from my DP 1.8GHz G5 to a new 2.8GHz 8 core Mac Pro. I plan to go slowly so if there are any major problems I can continue working on the G5 until they are (I hope) resolved.
I sent the following to AJA tech support:

I just purchased a Seritek PCI-e eSATA card. I which slot should I install the Kona LSe card and in which slot should I install the SeriTek/2SE2-E PCI Express (PCIe) card.

This was their reply (which I'm sure is based on extensive testing):

"Go to: about this mac -> more info --> hardware --> model identifier.
For v3.1 ("early 2008") Mac Pro : install Kona in slot 2 and Seritek in slot-4.
For V1.1 or 2.1 Mac Pro: install the Kona in slot-3 and Seritek in slot-4.

Then go to: /system/library/core services; launch the expansion slot utility.
Configure the PCIe slots for 16:1:4:4 (option 2).

I'm not sure if the V1.1 and V2.1 are the early models or not, (they're the pre-2008 models, original model used dual-core Xeons, then Quad-Core (Clovertown) CPUs. The 2008 is Quad-core Harpertown CPU based with faster memory, PCIe 2.0, etc.) but regardless some of your readers might be interested in the fact that different versions of the Mac Pro behave better with the same cards in different slots.
I'll let you know how this all works out.
Thanks!
-Mitch"

BTW - Early 2008 Mac Pro owners had previously reported problems (card not recognized) with SATA PCIe cards in slot 2 after the EFI Firmware Update 1.3 last month. (Most moved the card to slot 4 which restored operation per posts on the page of Feedback on 2008 Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.3).

Price Cut on Nvidia 8800GT Card Kit and BTO Price: (4/15/2008)
Apple cut the price of the 8800GT Card kit for 2008 Mac Pros to $279 (was $349 originally) and reduced the BTO option price of the 8800GT to $150 (was $200). They also added a Nvidia 8800GT card kit for 1st Gen Mac Pros for $279 at the Apple Store.

2008 Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update (and firmware restore CD update) (3/27/2008)

" Hey, Mike. Apple released a new boot ROM for the 2008 Mac Pros. It showed up in Software Update (3/27/2008). Here's what it says:

"This update fixes several issues to improve the stability of Mac Pro (Early 2008) computers.
After the firmware is successfully applied to your computer, your Boot ROM Version will be: MP31.006C.B05

You can confirm the version of the Boot ROM installed on your computer using System Profiler."

My current boot ROM version is MP31.006C.B02. I haven't restarted yet to see how well the update works.
-Aaron"

Checking Apple's support page shows download pages for the update also and a Firmware Restoration CD v1.5.

• Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.3
• Firmware Restoration CD 1.5

For those 2008 Mac Pro owners that have seen problems in the past if this update helps (or not) let me know.
FYI - initial replies from several readers said this fixed their reboot on wake from sleep - but one later wrote he saw that problem again - see the page of Feedback on 2008 Mac Pro EFI Firmware Update 1.3

FYI - I've posted a page with reader Feedback on Mac ATI 2600XT Firmware Update.

Apple posts ATI 2600XT Firmware Update (3/10/2008) The firmware update for ATI 2600XT cards a reader mentioned testing on March 1st has been released:

"About ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Firmware Update
This update is for Mac Pro computers with one or more ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards installed, running Mac OS X 10.5.2 or later with the Leopard Graphics Update.

It updates the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card firmware on all of the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics cards in the Mac Pro to improve system stability.
Requirements: OS X 10.5.2 or later, Leopard Graphics Update"

(BTW - the first reports on this update so far have not been good - ranging from minor to major issues and Michael B from AMUG reported higher wattage use/fan speeds after the update, despite the notes in the readme on improved energystar rating after the update.) If this update helps with graphics/freezing issue you had previously let me know.
(FYI - I had a pre-2008 Mac Pro owner running a 2600XT card that wrote the firmware updater would not apply on that system (saying it wasn't needed). He had not seen any graphics/freezing issues with the card in that system either.)

Nvidia 8800GT owner notes on some game problems: (FYI - I had replies to this post in the news page from a NWN2 owner running it fine on his single cpu/8800GT system (installed in apps folder) said it ran OK and even supported his Firewave. Also a COD2 owner said he's running v1.3 OK (w/no-DVD patch) with his 8800GT.)
FYI: For 8800GT owners with game problems (quits on start, etc.) - try trashing the game prefs/config file perhaps (especially if you recently had swapped in the 8800GT card and used an ATI 2600 previously - maybe something in the game prefs/config and trashing it will cause a new one to be created on the next run.)

"... I saw your post about NWN2 not working on mac pro's with 8800gt's. Just wanted to add that Star Wars: Empire at War (another aspyr port) also seems to have issues with the 8800gt. The game will work out of the box, but the latest patch (1.05a) from aspyr's site breaks it. You get garbage textures in the menus, so you can't select or start a game. I reverted to the version on the DVD, and everything seems to be working correctly- I've played through about half of the rebel campaign with no problems at all.
-Nick K."

(added 3/10/2008)
"Neverwinter Nights 2 is not compatible with Mac Pro's (Early 2008) upgraded to the 8800 GT video card. The game immediately crashes on startup 100% of the time. I filed a bug report with Aspyr and got this response:

"Unfortunately the NVIDIA Geforce 8800 video card in the new Mac Pro is not supported for NeverWinter Nights 2 . This video card was not around during the development of the game and so we could not test it.

This issue has been brought to our attention previously and we are in contact with Apple to try and find a solution."

Amazing that the developer would write "directly to the metal" so-to-speak. I thought that's why we had OpenGL and drivers so developers wouldn't have to rely on coding for specific graphics cards. Needless to say, after pre-ordering NWN2 through Amazon, getting priority shipping only to have a game that is worthless and won't work on my machine is very disappointing.
-Bryan P."

I asked he send a note if he spots an update to address this in the future. (I later had a 8800GT/NWN2 owner say he's running the game ok on his system with preinstalled 8800GT. I wrote Bryan to ask if he'd tried trashing the prefs/cfg.)
Another 8800GT owner wrote he's seen the same problem with Call of Duty 2:

" Hi Mike, I've just read the news about Neverwinter Nights 2 and I've the same issue with an other game from Aspyr. Call of Duty 2 is not compatible with Mac Pro's (Early 2008) upgraded to the 8800 GT video card, all updates done (10.5.2 and graphics). The game immediately crashes on startup 100% of the time. I send a bug report to Apple, I've tried to get a ticket from Aspyr on support page but I couldn't get an email answer.
Regards, Etienne "

And of course I later had a 8800GT/COD2 owner say he's running v1.3 OK on his sytem.
The COD2 mails reminded me of a mail last month from a MacBook Pro owner (Nvidia 8600M graphics) on performance (severe stutter) problems he'd seen with Call of Duty 2 (10.5.2/Leopard graphics update didn't help he said)

(added 3/10/2008)
"I was one of the first to report the Radeon 2600HD XT issues, and showed that it even had issues under Boot Camp in Windows, both with the original Boot Camp drivers, and with the upgraded ATI drivers as well. It's been about a week and a half now since my GeForce 8800GT arrived, and I haven't had any issue whatsoever with it. No strange lockups, no graphical corruptions of any kind, she's been running great ever since. Naturally, even Boot Camp runs great with the card. I'd definitely recommend spending the extra cash to move to it, even if you don't plan on buying games.

I'd also like to mention that I've since upgraded to 8GB of RAM for my Mac Pro from OWC. (the site specials page has 4GB (2x2GB) kit for $202.50) I live in Australia, so naturally finding DDR2 800MHz FBDIMMs at a reasonable price, or even finding them at all, is quite difficult here. However, even with the most expensive shipping option, OWC still undercuts everyone I could find here almost by half, and again with the most expensive international shipping option, I got the RAM delivered in roughly a week. You can't ask for better service than that.
Regards, Jay"

(added 3/10/2008)
"I received a new Mac Pro a couple of weeks ago. It's essentially a standard 2.8 GHz 8-core with the addition of a wireless keyboard and mouse, and the 8800GT video card. I've applied 10.5.2 and the 10.5.2 graphics updates. I don't have a UPS.
I'm using a new Samsung 2693HM monitor. I really like this display. It was reasonably priced. It's bright, extremely sharp and has good color to my eye. I haven't experienced the wake from sleep problem. However, I've had about a dozen freezes, most with the spinning cursor. One occurred while the screen saver was active. It continued to function perfectly.

I'm a software developer. Most of my work is in the embedded area but I also maintain on a volunteer basis one of the backend ports in the GCC compiler. So, one of the first things I did with the machine was to test building GCC on it. A complete build and check takes less than an hour, and it stresses disk and cpu. I haven't tried yet to push the machine to the limit as I've seen CPU temperatures reaching about 50 C with make -j4.
Most of the freezes that I mentioned above have occurred building GCC. I usually do the builds in the background, directing the output to a log. I've a habit of watching the log with the less program and the "F" command in a terminal window. This causes less to display the log file in realtime. It dawned on me a couple of days ago that this might be the cause of the freezes. Usually, when a freeze occurred, the log file would end with a number of "^@" characters. I'd also seen this occur briefly in the less display when the machine didn't freeze. So, I stopped watching the log with less. I also stopped spotlight from searching my GCC build directory. Since I did this, I haven't had a freeze.

There isn't much in the system log to help diagnose the problem. I have seen some log entries related mdworker. The kernel is also generating some SIGFPE exceptions:

Mar 6 19:43:07 *-*-*-mac-pro kernel[0]: unknown SIGFPE code 1, subcode 0

That doesn't look good to me but it doesn't seem to be the cause of the freeze. I'm just guessing but would say the freezes are a kernel bug related to disk I/O.
Overall, I like the speed, performance and price point of the new Mac Pro. However, it's stability currently falls short of current linux distributions.

(he later wrote)
Have to back off the theory that less is involved. Had a freeze last night in a GCC build where there was no activity other than the build and the standard background processes. This is the end of the build log:
libtool: compile: /Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/./gcc/xgcc -shared-libgcc -B/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/./gcc -nostdinc++ -L/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/i686-apple-d arwin9/x86_64/libstdc++-v3/src -L/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/i686-apple-darwin9/x 86_64/libstdc++-v3/src/.libs -B/opt/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.4.0/i686-apple-darwin9/bin/ -B /opt/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.4.0/i686-apple-darwin9/lib/ -isystem /opt/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.4.0/i 686-apple-darwin9/include -isystem /opt/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.4.0/i686-apple-darwin9/sys -include -m64 -I/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/i686-apple-darwin9/x86_64/libstdc++-v 3/include/i686-apple-darwin9 -I/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/objdir/i686-apple-darwin9/x86 _64/libstdc++-v3/include -I/Users/dave/gnu/gcc/gcc/libstdc++-v3/libsupc++ -fno-i mplicit-templates -Wall -Wextra -Wwrite-strings -Wcast-qual -fdiagnostics-show-l ocation=once -fvisibility-inlines-hidden -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -g -O2 -m64 -c ../../../../../gcc/libstdc++-v3/src/wlocale-inst.cc -fno-common -DP IC -o .libs/wlocale-inst.o
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^.... (repeating)
-Dave"

(added 3/7/2008)
"As a followup to my experience and to mirror Steve's comments (Mar. 6th report below on Firewire device related Problems). I have have had no issues with the MacPro when all FW and USB devices are disconnected. I have had USB stalls traced to a bad aluminum USB keyboard, which eventually failed completely, and to a HP 3100 printer (or its cable). I have had FW bus resets affecting a multitude of components traced to a LaCie Big Drive, and a OWC Neptune drive which eventually failed completely. I have had long boot and shutdown times traced to both. None of these components seemed to affect the G4 Gigbit tower the 08 MacPro replaced. When I connect only one device at a time they work fine. There seems to be many similar reports, but also with other models. (Are you running 10.5.2 w/all updates? (just for the record - I ask in the email link to note that just as a FYI) I recently had a reader say his FW800 drive performance took a nosedive after the 10.5.2 update (not a 2008 Mac Pro) - I'm running 10.5.2 w/AL iMac using FW800 connected ministack (w/1TB drive - one TM partition, one CCC partition and one partition for data backup/EyeTV recordings) - seems fine w/10.5.2 although I have not benchmarked it (and being more than 1/2 full now the rates would be lower)-Mike)
I have 10.5.2 with all updates, came with 10.5.1 and used software update to go to 10.5.2. Xbench reported overall better scores for the external FW LaCie (which has two drives and a raid controller internally) than for any of the internal Seagate SATA drives. (RAID0 stripes boost performance, although how full the drives are also affects that. (Outer tracks are fastest and performance drops as drives fill.) Fragmentation also affects performance.) I don't recall the numbers but I didn't notice any performance issues in 10.5.1 or 10.5.2, just bus resets in the log when other devices were also attached, and connection issues for the other devices.

On a side note, over the weekend I replaced my FIOS router with a 1TB time capsule without a hitch and its been working flawlessly. I set time machine to back up the MacPro (initially via hardwire and a 14-16 hour task for 400GBs of data, performance monitor indicating less than 10MB per-second disc reads at the max). I set the Time Capsule to N mode, 5GHz only (I'm using my old base station to support the legacy b/g network). I am getting a little better than the 15MB download and 2MB uploads as I was getting when hard wired (Speedtest.net). I was experiencing periodic dropouts and stalls using the FIOS supplied router, and have not seen the same thing in days, knock on wood.
-Sam"

The fastest mode is 5GHz (N only), which I run at times with my Apple N base and the AL iMac/Apple TV - although I have to switch to 2.4GHz mixed mode when I need to share the network with older macs with 802.11G/B cards (or 3rd party 802.11N adapters that don't support 5GHz mode) Even in 5GHz mode in the last month I've seen a few times safari fail to load pages with the "you are not connected to the internet" error message (Airport menu bar strength shows full bars)... I've had been playing around with the Apple N base's multicast rate settings also around the time that started happening...

(added 3/7/2008)
Don't know if you know about this:
"Response to Mac Pro fault isn't reassuring" (Baltimore Sun Mar. 6, 2008 story regarding reboot on wake from sleep issue - mentioned swapping drives and zapping pram - the latter is a tip many have said here helped, although not a permanent fix for everyone, it has helped many per their comments here since the 2008 Mac Pros first shipped. Other tips for various other problems mentioned previously here were disabling ES sleep, SMC resets, etc. - and one recent report mentioned FW device problems.-Mike)
Best Wishes, Mitch"

He also did a pram zap also after the drive swap, but it will be interesting to see if the problem resurfaces again over time. (It did for some although again many have said here that a pram zap at least initially solved the problem.) The real question is what is the root cause.

(added 3/7/2008)
I got the standard 2.8GHz octo-core / 2600XT with extre 6x1GB OWC Ram and 3 Samsung HD 501 LJ SATA drives in the remaining bays.
I did not have the cold reboot after sleep issue, nor do I experience any graphics abnomalies. (Just for the record did you apply the 10.5.2/Leopard graphics update? (I asked in the mail link above to note that.)-Mike)

What I do experience are some flaws concerning Firewire 400 port. My CamCorder (always reliable on the iMac) sometimes refuses to import video in iMovie08. The camcorder rewinds, but doesn't play the tape for import. Rebooting helps. This happened twice already but I did also have it wake up after sleep and work just fine with the camcorder.

What bothers me most is that the computer stinks. When first booted, we had to close the door to our office. The strong sweet artificial smell was very intense. I let it "burn in" by having all 8 cores up 100% load for 24 hrs and the stink does get less. But still I can smell in the house if the MacPro was running or not... This does bug me a lot. Especially after the 2006 MacPro suffered the same problem and Apple's QS does seem to be blind on that spot.
-Tim"

I think I recall someone mentioning this about the original Mac pro, but not had anyone else so far comment on this with the new models (maybe they're not as sensitive to it).

(added 3/7/2008)
MP Specs: Dual 3.2GHz Quad; nVidia 8800GT; 2GB Stock Apple RAM; 500GB Stock WD HD + 3x 500GB WD HD
I've been adding upgrades gradually, to see what issues appear/disappear with each component. I haven't experienced the reboot-on-wake problem exactly, but have some observations in that regard.
(Just for the record did you apply the 10.5.2 and leopard graphics update?-Mike)
No software updates of any kind. I want to get up to speed one step at a time, to help with troubleshooting.

My Mac Pro (and 30" LCD) is plugged into a sturdy old APC 800RT UPS with fresh batteries. I -temporarily- have the old G4 (and 24" LCD) plugged into the same UPS. (I would not want to run both machines on that one UPS. I'd but a 2nd one for the Mac Pro - or not have the G4 connected to it. APC >1000VA UPS are fairly cheap (just over $100) at club stores here for years.-Mike) If both machines are sleeping and I wake the G4 immediately followed by the Mac Pro, the UPS will beep as the MP wakes, and the *G4* shuts off! The new Mac Pro clearly draws a lot of current for a split second when waking up (as the fans come on full speed briefly), and that may be enough to knock out an under-powered (or over-loaded) UPS and cause the common restart problem. Perhaps someone with a newer unit that has a digital display can confirm.

On another note, I have seen the occasional oddity that appears USB-related. After putting the MP to sleep for the night, upon returning will sometimes find it seemingly awake (power light on), but no video and mouse/keyboard unresponsive. All devices are plugged into a powered Xircom 4-port USB hub. Unplugging and replugging the hub seems to revive the keyboard, allowing a proper "wake" and video to return. I will have to try running without the hub to see if it recurs. Will report back if the software updates change anything as well.
-Vic"

If you're seeing that problem I'd just have the keyboard plugged directly into the Mac. (Disconnecting/reconnecting USB devices that are not recognized is an old tip after OS X updates also - and when leopard was first released there were several reports of USB devices not being recognized after wake from sleep (even with some macs onboard USB ports, although many were from USB 2.0 card users)

First report on flashing a PC Nvidia 8800GT with Mac ROM: See report/details in March 6th news page.

(added 3/6/2008)
"A small update to my earlier post of 27th February:
I've installed an extra 6x 1GB RAM (from OWC), to fill all the slots equally, and installed a WD Raptor 150GB HD as my boot disk. As a result, I obviously reinstalled all my software...

The whole feel of the Mac Pro has been completely transformed. In its current form it now boots from cold in under 20 seconds - that Raptor drive is quite something! No freezes or problems of any kind so far.

It is now the machine I expected it to be when I first bought it, and I'm really looking forward to exploring its limits. Guess I'll have to get a 8800 video card now...!!
regards, Pete"

Firewire related Problems:

(added 3/6/2008)
"Here's a follow up to an earlier e-mail I sent you regarding my Mac Pro (2008). My configuration is the 2.8GHz 8-core with the 8800GT, 8GB RAM, three SATA drives, and Airport Extreme. I have the 8800GT card, so I haven't experienced any of the display issues traced to the ATI 2600XT systems; however I have seen the occasional restart after wake and random kernel panics, which until recently didn't seem to have any recognizable pattern.
Over the past couple of days, I have noticed a common denominator to my Mac's problems. The culprit seems to involve the firewire bus in some way. I don't want to bore you with too many details, but in my situation I have multiple firewire devices: several external hard drives (both FW400 & FW800), an Eridol audio interface, an external CDRW, and a Sony camcorder I use for iChat video. I have never had any problems with these devices running with my prior Dual G5 system (including waking from sleep), and they remained turned on and available most of the time. With the Mac pro, I noticed that whenever I experienced a freeze or other failure, the event seemed to be preceeded by some kind of anomaly with one or more of my firewire devices. For example, my Eridol will "disappear" as a choice in the Sound Preferences panel shortly before I experience a freeze or panic. At other times, one or more of my firewire hard drives will disappear or will behave erratically (or access will slow down) before a kernel panic. Even my camcorder gets into the act sometimes and won't be recognized by iChat shortly before a crash.

Most interesting, I've had occasions when the Mac hangs with the spinning beach ball (usually when I'm trying to log out), and in those situations I can sometimes recover by turning off one or more of my firewire devices. On other occasions, this fix lead to a kernel panic, so it's not a real solution, but this experience adds additional evidence to the theory that the Mac Pro is unhappy with the firewire bus.

Consequently, I believe that something is amiss with the Mac Pro's firewire interface, and this is causing the machine to freeze, hang and restart unexplainably. This might also explain the restart after waking from sleep, since one of the steps the OS takes when waking is to send a signal to devices on the firewire chain to wake them as well. Perhaps this event triggers an unexpected state in the firewire bus and forces a panic/restart.
I don't have any way to conclusively prove that firewire is the cause for my Mac Pro's woes, because even if I run without any peripherals attached, the internal firewire circuitry is still active (but if FW devices are a factor, with none connected that should help), but I am going to try this approach to see if the problems continue. Perhaps your other readers might notice a similar pattern to help confirm this theory.
(he later wrote)
One other detail: In response to the Mac Pros continuing issues, I've reset the PRAM more times than I can remember (that was a common tip for wake from sleep restarts - many said it helped, but one reader said the problem reappeared a week later-Mike), and I also reformatted the original drive and reinstalled everything by hand (e.g., the OS, iLife, personal apps) to avoid reintroducing any Rosetta-dependent code. This machine is about as clean as they come at this point. Still, the freeze/panic/restart problems continue to resurface every so often in normal use.
Thanks, Steve"

The first rule of troubleshooting is to minimize the equation (remove 3rd party addons, connected devices, etc.) - if anyone else finds their problems are related to FW/connected devices let me know. (Run for several days or more as a test.)

More 8800GT Upgrade Kit Feedback:

(added 3/5/2008)
"Got my nVidia 8800GT update card for the Mac Pro Monday; installation was a snap once I located the power cord they sent with the card. On first reboot, however, I had an odd anomaly: sometimes the system ignored key input, or there was a significant delay in the response. I ran Onyx set to flush all caches as well as repair permissions etc., rebooted, and all has been well since.

I wanted to run the card with just one monitor (30" HD CD) for a while but the past two+ weeks of running dual screens as a workaround for the ATI 2600 freeze issue has spoiled me, and I plugged in the second screen (24" Acer) after about 12 hours uptime: no issues or problems.

There are noticeable improvements over the ATI 2600: World of Warcraft. my most intense graphics application, runs MUCH faster on the 8800GT; instead of frame rates in the mid-40s on the ATI card I'm usually up around 120-130+ FPS even tho I've boosted the texture filtering and some other settings to the max. Also in WoW the "hitching" or "venetian blinding" of screen redraws is gone, and the game finally plays as I always thought it should on such a powerful computer: like butter.

It's early days yet but mark me "very happy" with the upgrade so far.
Best, Tim"

(added 3/4/2008, from 3/3 mail)
"8800GT upgrade kit feedback
I received my 8800GT upgrade kit for my early '08 Mac Pro, installed it, and here are some early impressions after a couple hours of use on 10.5.2 with 10GB of RAM:

* The card's fan is nearly as silent as the 2600 it replaced, though it is a bit louder.

* Things that were choppy before, such as spaces and stacks of lots of icons like my applications, are now smooth as butter.

* Apple Motion - real time rendering of HD 1080P projects is worlds faster. I can get 20 fps on my logo render in real time whereas with the 600 I was getting 8-10. It's easily a 2X improvement, and makes my workflow usable again. HOWEVER, when I do a RAM preview (the old "Motion Mark" benchmark-Mike), the speed is no faster than the 2600 was (and the 1900XT, for that matter) in most tests. The CPUs barely get touched during said preview, and the CPU is what is being used.
I wonder if there is just a bug in Motion's RAM preview and/or the way Core Image hooks in for those types of renders. (I didn't see a lot of difference in Motion Mark tests either when I first tried it a couple years ago when their website was online (RIP now)-Mike)

* I have no reboot on sleep issue.

Now onto Vista testing using BootCamp... -P"

(added 3/4/2008)
"Thank you and the contributors for this great site! Really useful. My new Mac pro arrived 3 days ago - stock 8-core 2.8 GHz; 320 HDD (WD 3200 AAJS - 41VWAO); 2GB RAM and the 8800GT. Will add RAM (16 GB total- OWC) and disks (two Samsung SpinPoint 320's in RAID 0 for the System & Apps; 1 SpinPoint 1TB for data & another SpinPoint 1TB for backup and system images).

I applied 10.5.2 and Leopard Graphics Update for 10.5.2 right away. After 3 days of use no display problems whatsoever (using 1st DVI port).
No sleep issues - not using a UPS.

So far very pleased with stability and speed, but have not really stressed the system yet.

Two issues, that may seem minor, but nevertheless bug me a lot:

1. Audio Optical Out port (Toslink) is always on.
(FYI- this is normal apparently - another reader said "every Mac I have ever had with an optical port (Powerbook G4, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro 3 versions, PowerMac G5) that I can rememeber always had the red light in the jack on whether I was using it or not."-Mike)
Even with the little latch closed you can clearly see the light behind it. I've called Apple support about this, but the support guy didn't really know if the thing is supposed to be on continuously. Couldn't find anything about it in the Apple documentation.
Had me zap the Pram and check the audio settings - to no avail.
Then asked me to hold the line, to come back and tell me that his colleague, who, I was told, owns a Mac pro, also has an Optical Out port that's always on. Still seems weird to me - anybody out there care to check their optical ports?

2. Overall the Mac Pro is pretty quiet, but mine regularly produces a weird rattling/vibrating sound. (Do you hear that when a hard drive is seeking perhaps? (although the 2008 Mac Pros had some drive bay isolation to help dampen that as shown in some earlier photos here).-Mike)
The sound is not very loud, a bit above the noise floor of the Mac pro when it starts, but it is well audible, and enough to annoy me when it happens.
It starts out soft, to grow louder in burst of +/- 5 secs, and usually comes in series. Very irregular, can be absent for more than an hour, only to reemerge like 20 times in the next half hour.
Have removed the empty drive sleds - no difference. Nothing seems to be loose inside. Sounds like a ventilator problem - will have it checked at my dealer's.
Other than that - real bliss!
(>Do you hear the rattling/vibration noise when a hard drive is seeking (although the 2008 Mac Pros had some drive bay isolation to help dampen that as shown here in some earlier photos below)-Mike)
No, it seems to have nothing to do with the hard drive seeking. I can clearly hear it when the stock WD is seeking (now the only drive in there) -the soft rattle I hear is something entirely different.
I've tried several things: opened up the side panel so I could hold my fingers against the hard drive/drive sled/graphical card/whatever to see if it made any difference. But none of those parts seem to be responsible for the noise.
cheers, Wout"

(added 3/4/2008)
"I wanted to let you know about my experiences so far. After exchanging my late '07 Mac Pro for an '08 model (it's a long story), I'm now seeing excellent results. Here's my config:

2.8GHz 8 core, 2GB Apple RAM (soon to be 10GB with the addition of 4 x 2GB RAM from OWC)
4 x 500GB Seagate drives (as a RAID-5 array with the Apple RAID card)
NVIDIA 8800 GT video card, connected to an Apple 30" Cinema Display (soon to be joined by a second 30" Cinema Display)
new wireless keyboard and mouse

Also: have the OS up to date (including the Leopard Graphics Update), and I'm running both the CPU and the monitor off of a 1500VA APC UPS.

The machine runs just beautifully, and the disc array performance is spectacular (it's peaked at over 200MB/sec reads). However:

1) I can't put the machine to sleep (due to the RAID card - it's a known issue at Apple), so I haven't experienced any rebooting problems on wake. This isn't a huge problem for me, but it would be nice to properly sleep the machine and save electricity. Maybe one day the RAID drivers will be updated to allow this.

2) There are display artifacts under certain circumstances. Sometimes, when I reboot the machine or wake the display from sleep, I will see cyan artifacts around the mid-tone pixels. Makes the display unusable. But there is a trivial work-around: I've set a corner of the display to "Sleep Display", and if I sleep/wake the display again, it functions correctly (I literally just put the display to sleep and wake it immediately - takes about 1 second). To the best of my knowledge, this only started happening *after* the Graphics Update was applied. That said, considering the amount of downtime I've had getting this machine repaired/replaced, it is a minor inconvenience, and the work-around only takes a second or so. If I were to guess what is going on, I'd bet that the 8800 driver isn't correctly initializing the card on wake, and sometimes it takes a second initialization (with the sleep/wake cycle) to reset it properly. (Just for the record are you running OS X 10.5.2 w/Leopard Graphics Update 1.0?-Mike)
That's right. I wish I had run it longer prior to installing the update to OS X 10.5.2/LGU 1.0 to isolate whether or not the updates caused the problem, but I do have one small clue that points away from the LGU: after I had applied the 10.5.2 update, but before applying the LGU, the reboot after the 10.5.2 update showed the artifacts. I remember hoping that the Graphics update would cure that (but it didn't).

I'm hoping that when the second 30" is attached (and the additional RAM is installed), all will still be functioning correctly. Aside from the two minor points about, the '08 Mac Pro is a wonderful machine - I couldn't be more pleased with the performance.

Oh, and FWIW, I do actually like the new "minimal" wireless keyboard. I'm not missing the numeric keypad as much as I thought I would. I'll have to use the keyboard some more to see if I really do need the keypad, but I'm thinking I might be able to get away without it. I'd like that, since the tiny footprint of the keyboard frees up a surprising amount of space on my desk. That, and it looks quite amusing beside the 30" display...
-Peter"

(added 3/4/2008)
"I picked up a base-configuration Mac Pro 8-core 2.8, added another 10GB of RAM from OWC for a total of 12GB, and added a new 500GB WD SATA drive. I also put in a WD 250GB SATA drive I already had. No graphics problems, no wake-from-sleep problems, no freezing problems...it's pretty much all working how I hoped. (knock on wood!). (Are you running OS X 10.5.2 w/Leopard Graphics Update 1.0?-Mike) Yes indeed.

The only problem I've seen is it gets stuck on the gray screen when booting with a firewire drive attached...I think this might be a more general problem, though, as a friend has the same problem with his Macbook Pro when he has an iPod attached. Strange, but I don't boot it often...
-Greg R."

FYI - Last month I linked to an Apple kbase doc titled Finder may not load with external drive connected in Mac OS X 10.5.2 that has some suggestions and settings to check if you're seeing that problem. Let me know if any of those suggestions help.

(added 3/4/2008)
"Thanks for your site, i have a mac pro 8 core with 4gb ram and 8800gt with 30" cinema display and 3x 500gb disks
i'm extremely happy with this system, except that i have the problem that my mac reboots after getting it out of sleep mode.. i disabled sleep mode for the moment but i hate it. They put the ST3500630AS Seagate Barracuda 500GB, 7200 RPM 16MB cache in the machine, while there are 32 mb versions available (ST3500320AS).
I hope they fix that mac reboot thing fast after sleep mode!!
Thanks, Y. Soete"

It may not be a permanent fix, but most that have had the restart on wake problem here said a pram zap helped, although at least one reader said a week later it reappeared.

ATI 2600XT Update coming?: (Update - on 3/10/2008 apple posted ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT Firmware Update.)

(added 3/4/2008 - from 3/1 mail)
"just want to let you know that apple is working on the graphics problem with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 Cards.
I got an invitation to an AppleSeed to test a Mac Pro update. After the login it says its an bios update for the ati cards. It's not ready yet but the download should be possible in the next days...
So, there's coming something to solve the problems...
(I asked if it was an actual flash update to the card or an updated driver/or ROM Xtender file (which is sort of like a software loaded firmware/patch file)-Mike)
it's a new rom version for the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT:
ROM-Version: 113-B1480A-252
I'm not sure what it was before, something like 113-B1480A-234 (Perhaps -236, which a reader said his 2600XT card has, although versions they ship can change over time.-Mike) - the last three numbers went up.
Officially it's not public yet - just want to let you know that Apple is working on the problem.
No more freezes with the new ROM :)"

(added 3/4/2008)
"I just wanted to give you another data point on the new Mac Pro's.
I got an 8 core, 2.8 GHz Mac Pro with the 8800GT graphic card option last week. So far it's been rock solid for me, with just some minor glitches mentioned below. I haven't had any graphics glitches. I've slept it manually several times and it has woken up fine. I have to admit it doesn't sleep by itself normally, at least the one time I tried it. But I don't normally have it go to sleep anyway so it's not a big issue for me.

It did freeze up three times in the course of running the updates to bring Adobe CS3 Design Premium up to date, but whatever the problem was, it seemed to be related to that update process because it hasn't recurred since.

I'm delighted with how fast it seems compared to my original G5 Tower (2x2.0 GHz). Aperture in particular is very snappy and I can move between pictures in non-Quick Preview mode almost as quickly as in Quick Preview mode.

Thanks so much for assembling these reports that gave me the confidence to go ahead and order this machine. So far I'm very happy with it.
-Bill H."

(added 3/4/2008 - from 3/1 mail)
"My first Mac --- I received my MacPro about 14 days ago (3GHz, 2GB ram + 8GB from OWC, 500 WD from Apple store, 8800GT), with 30" Cine Display. UPS is APC XP1500. I applied the 10.5.2 and graphics update. Like the machine, but it's freezing about once per day. Sometimes I can't move the mouse or actuate the caps lock light; sometimes it's a window/process that I can't kill; but never does the machine give me an error message. My freezes require hard power cycling. Per Apple Support, I did an erase and install, but no change. Apple Support is sending me a new Mac Pro, but I am not confident that will solve the problem. By the way, I do not think I've been having the reboot on wake up problem. Also, I've seen no pixel garbage on the screen, nor any kernel panics. Very disappointed to be dealing with this from a new machine. I would love to know the cause of this.
(Day 1 reports from 2008 Mac Pro owners here on freezes had an initial tip to disable all energy saver sleep options (pram zaps/SMC resets were other things some tried) - but I assume apple would have suggested that.-Mike)
I did not try the energy saver options, but so far the freeze hasn't happenned for 5 days (just in time for the replacement machine to arrive from Apple).
I did the 10.5.2 update, followed by the graphics update. Second time was after an erase and install.

No addon cards, or logon items, but I did download iStat, Onyx, Deeper.
Apple suggested that I try removing my RAM from OWC and see if the freezes continue. But, since I haven't had more freezes, I haven't taken out the added RAM (yet). I will keep you informed. (Maybe my freezes were "new machine jitters?")
-Paul"

(added 3/4/2008 - from Feb 29th mail)
"Hi Mike, I was the guy with the first delivery report on the Mac Pro with nVidia 8800. Just wanted to update you that I have seen exactly one (1) instance of reboot instead of wake from sleep - this was the first time after the 10.5.2 update + Leopard Graphics update. I rebooted (again) and zapped the PRAM, and it has not reoccurred since. Still rock solid in all other respects.

FWIW, I purchased Quake 4, and it runs 1920x1080, with ultra high quality textures, 8x AA, and all other settings maxed out, at about 55-60 fps (capped at 60 fps) during regular play.

Anyway, I've reinstalled the LITE-ON 52x CD-RW (Model LTR-52327S (rev QS57)) in the Mac Pro. Rather than trim the drive tray, I thought that I might modify the optical drive carrier by filing the rear screw holes more open a little toward the bottom, by 1mm or so. This allows the rear of the drive to sit lower than the front, causing the drive tray to extend at a slight upward angle. This works like a charm - the drive tray clears the slot with enough clearance. Of course, filing too low would be a bad thing.

Works like a charm, and I get a little better performance on CD-ROMs/CD-Rs (52x instead of the Superdrive's 32x). For some reason this install seems quieter than I remember the original try.

Of course, I may be screwed down the road if I need to replace that bottom slot, and the new drive extends slightly too high - I guess I would need to make sure the rear was supported so it sat level again.
-Ed"

(added 3/4/2008 - from Feb 29th mail)
"I can't tell you guys how happy I was to finally find this site... I have a 2008 Eight Core 2.8 Mac Pro with the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card, 320gig HD with added 500gig Western Digital HD 16mb cache (bought from newegg 104.99) (same drive is $105 on site specials page here. But I think I'd spring for an extra $45 and get the 334GB per platter(!) 750GB Samsung F1 drive.-Mike) 6gigs of apple ram and an airport wireless card.

I finally took my baby in for repair at the apple store yesterday after the straw that broke the camels back, a shutdown while I was in the middle of work. My problems started off when the Mac Pro would not wake up, but restart, from sleep. When I would try to wake up the computer from sleep the fans would rev up full steam and then the computer would restart. (tried the pram zip tip?) At first I thought it was the 5 external HDs I had daisy chained through the firewire 400 port. But even after I turned off the external drives the problem still existed. I had a friend suggest I reset the SMU but they only had the DIY for the G5 online. Also had a friend suggest I check the console logs and search for shutdown, and if the causes were in between 1-5 it was normal, but any negative numbers or higher numbers were out of the ordinary. All of my shutdown logs were 5s or 3s until my shutdown in the middle of a project that gave me a -2. Thats when I made my appointment ASAP and took her in!

By the way, I used to work for Apple so I know that the Genius that day took my situation seriously. But since my computer was a CTO they couldn't do a swap out, but they are going to order a new power supply, should take 3-5 business days. They also checked if Apple has made them aware of this possible issue, but nothing.

I stared out with a G3 Lombard my favorite laptop was 1Ghz G4 TiBook I got my Mac Pro to work with Motion and Final Cut Pro. I used to laugh at people after they left the Apple Store who used to curse us out and say "I spent $5,000 here and this machine is a piece of junk" and they would walk out mad. But I had never had an Apple computer act this quirky and my G5 NEVER gave me any problems. I spent all of this money to get the latest and greatest and now I feel like a lab rat for a product launched maybe too prematurely. I haven't told my dad of this issue yet because he is a hard-core programmer who's motto is "NEVER BUY A REV A"- One day I'm gonna learn the old man is always right! Thanks again for letting me vent! - 'AppleGuy'"

(added 3/4/2008 - from Feb 29th mail)
"Mike, I just received my 2.8 GHz quad mac pro (single socket) this week. The machine is blazingly fast and much quieter than the dual 2.3 GHz G5 tower it replaced. I ordered it with the stock Radeon HD 2600 XT and it's still plenty fast for my Aperture 2 use. I installed 3 additional SATA drives I had on hand... the cableless drive system is a real pleasure to use. The machine has a total of 6GB, I added 2x2GB purchased from OWC. I installed according to the manual, moving one of the original memory modules to the other daughtercard.

My only complaint is that it suffers from the reboot on wake issue. I've tried zapping PRAM, resetting SMC and nothing has helped at all. (Many (most I think) with the restart on wake said a pram zap helped. Make sure you keep keys down until you hear the restart bong tone at least 3 times.) My UPC is on the small side, 725VA, but it worked perfectly with my (more power hungry) G5 tower. Nonetheless I unplugged the Mac Pro from the battery backup and moved it to just the surge protection outlets. This didn't help, I still see the problem. I'm running 10.5.2 with the Leopard Graphics update. Looking at the apple support forums I see no common features in the machines that have the problem. I really hope apple sorts this out as otherwise the machine is incredible!
-John M.

FYI on 3rd Party PCIe Cards/Drivers causing 2nd Display/Port Problems (No Quartz Extreme support):
(To save space here I removed all the many previous mails/questions/replies, forum posts etc. earlier here on this issue) Finally got a note from Graham on what PCIe cards/drivers he had installed - one of which was the source of his 8800GTs 2nd DVI Port performance/artifacts/no Quartz Extreme support problem. (FYI - the main news page also had a FYI on Kona 3 card Drivers and disabled 2nd Display Quartz Extreme support with a note that the original 5.1 drivers for the Kona 3 card also caused similar problems.)

"No Kona card, but I do have a BlackMagic Decklink HD Extreme card.
What I've added to the system:
BlackMagic Decklink HD Extreme
Highpoint RocketRaid 2522
16 gigs OWC 800 RAM
2x750 gigs Western Digital HDs
(Have you tried booting w/o those card/drivers installed as a check?? (got a 2nd HD with a standard 10.5.2 install to test boot with??)-Mike)
Ah ha! Yes, I removed the BlackMagic HD Extreme card, and now the 8800 GT runs the way it should! Bad news...it doesn't look like there are updated drivers for the BlackMagic card. (For the record in case there's an update later to the drivers - what version are you using. Worth reporting this to them also.-Mike)
Thank you for all of your help
-Graham"

He later wrote that BlackMagic replied this is a known issue with a link to their Dec. 2007 dated Support page titled: Quartz Extreme capable video card error which notes:

"Quartz Extreme capable video card error
When launching Final Cut Pro and you have a DeckLink card or Multibridge installed, you might encounter the following error message:

"This system does not meet the following minimum system requirements: Final Cut Pro requires that your system have a Quartz Extreme capable video card".

Testing has found that this problem only occurs if the computer monitor is connected to DVI port number 2 as shown in the following diagram...

To avoid the error message, shut down the Mac, disconnect the computer monitor and then reconnect it to DVI port number 1. Now start up the Mac and you should be able to launch Final Cut Pro without problems.

An alternative solution is to disable the desktop feature in the DeckLink settings in the System Preferences. A restart will be required after disabling the desktop feature.
This error has been reported to Apple."

I asked Graham if he had tried the "Alternative Solution" (disable the desktop feature in the DeckLink settings in the System Preferences)

(added 2/27/2008)
"2x 3.0Ghz 8 core Monster! 8800GT, 2GB Ram then added 8GB from OWC for 10GB Total
320GB Boot disk then added 750GB WD Enterprise drive plus another 320GB Drive. All updates applied 10.5.2 including the Leopard graphics update. Transferred 220GB of data from the G5 dual 2.7 via FW400. Installed Vista Home premium via bootcamp on WD drive. So I could install and enjoy Halo 2. (vista only sees 2GB Ram ...what a joke! And, only one processor!!)
HP 22" w2207 Display using the VGA instead of the DVI for now. (will switch later)
Halo 2 played with all graphic settings maxed out. (cool!)
APC UPS 1500, External Lacie 320 GB HD (waiting for another update first to use time machine though)
Had the machine for 3 weeks now and there have been no problems at all.
It's quiet and fast! No display issues. I'm very happy with the Super Macintosh.
-Hal"

(added 2/27/2008)
"First thanks so much for your site; big help when getting my new system together. Here's my $.02. (Dual 2.8GHz CPUs, 4GB RAM, Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B02, SMC Version: 1.25f4
I added 2 Gigs of RAM from RamJet; no problems so far. I have seen none of the wake-from-sleep or any other weirdness at all. Very pleased with the overall speed and stability.
Three issues:

1. My Epson Perfection 2450 doesn't work with Photoshop CS3 unless I run PS in Rosetta mode, a trick I learned from your site. (Tip mentioned on the Scanners w/OS X Leopard page - Epson scan 2.77 not universal binary) I switch over to scan, then switch back as Rosetta slows things down quite a bit - no surprise there.

2. I bought 2 of the Seagate 7200.10 500G drives with the nitwit AAK firmware that slows things down, as documented here: (FYI - there's also notes/links here about some 7200.11 firmware versions incorrectly reporting drive model and cache size.)
http://www.fluffles.net/articles/seagate-AAK-firmware
http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&message.id=795
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/28/2031234
I managed to locate a source of the new firmware and had a friend flash the drives on his PC to AAM (updater doesn't run on a Mac, natch). Result: average throughput went from 54.5MB/sec to 65.8 MB/sec, according to HD Tune on his PC. I installed them in my tower and was able to format and use them, where they are humming right along (very low noise; can't hear them at all from where I'm sitting.) These I use for files and photos, using the stock 350G Seagate that came with the tower for System and apps.

3. 3rd monitor problem. I am a web developer and depend on 3 monitors to give me the real estate I need for complex stuff. I decided I wanted the nVidia 8800 to increase drawing of big photos to my screen (I'm also a commercial photographer), and, to avoid mixing and matching video card manufacturers and their drivers, I decided to order an nVidia 7300 from the Apple store to drive my 3rd monitor.

Big problem: the (Nvidia) 7300 is not supported on the "Early 2008" Mac Pros. I found this out after going through 2 cards in an attempt to make this work. (I think a reader mentioned that earlier here-Mike) I checked with Apple before I ordered and was assured the card would work; this was in error. I learned this the old fashioned way, on the Web. There is a long discussion about the 7300 problem here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6579010�
and an official note buried here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305346 (Apple doc linked here last month titled "Power Mac G5, Mac Pro, Mac Pro (Early 2008): Video cards not compatible between models" - although Oliver used his ATI X1900 from his 2006 Mac Pro in his 2008 Mac Pro, and IIRC someone claimed the 2600XT worked in a 2006 Mac Pro w/OS X leopard.-Mike)
After bringing this to the attention of the escalated helper at the Applecare help line, he fessed up that this was new to him, that there should be a disclaimer on the Apple store and that they would get me going with a different set up. Bottom line: the nVidia 7300 card doesn't work with the Early 2008 Mac Pros. Hope this helps someone.
-Mike G."

(added 2/27/2008)
"I've had a new Mac Pro 8-core for a month. It has had 4 kernel panics in 20 startups (kernel panics occurred anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour after startup). Apple Genius Bar guys said it was because of Symantec Anti-Virus for Mac. Pulled Symantec off today and we'll see. The blank blue screen at startup lasts for 3-4 minutes.
-Derek V."

(added 2/27/2008)
"Hi guys! A big thank you for this site, it's a veritable gold-mine of information. I don't know what the geoographic spread of your viewers/contributors is, but I'm UK based and visit your site regularly. I've had my MacPro dual 2.8, 2 GB RAM, ATI 2600XL, 500GB WD drive a month now, fortunately with none of the graphic problems commonly aired. It's delightful to use, my third Mac, PowerMac G4 and G5s preceding it. It's easily the quietest, much more relaxing to use in the quiet country market town I live in.

Nevertheless, it hasn't been without its quirks, such as the 'eject' key on the keyboard initially refused to function, until I hesitatingly applied the 10.5.2 update, whereupon it functioned without problem! (holding it down for a second required) It is also amazingly slow to boot up, taking 4-5 times longer than my G5 PowerMac running Tiger, which has probably 3-4 times the number of applications installed on it. Very strange.

It takes 5-6 minutes from start-up before the MIDI interface is recognised, almost as if it was wandering around looking in odd corners, and suddenly 'found' it by accident. I bought this Mac with Logic Express ready installed, as I use my Macs extensively for music creation and processing, so that is a little irritating.

Unfortunately my UPS died recently, so until I get a replacement, I can't give you any information on that for the moment. I'm awaiting the arrival of 6GB of additional RAM, from OWC, so I can fill all 8 slots and utilise the memory throughput most efficiently. I'll post some more as it becomes apparent, hopefully with some comparisons for the additional memory.

By the way, for those who like to see what is going on in the innards of their machine, I've installed the iStat Pro widget. (free download at islayer.com website-Mike) This tells you all your temperatures for the cores, Northbridge, ambient, Expansion Slots, and HDD bays; all your fan speeds, CPU usage, Bluetooth, Memory usage, and Disks. Very handy little widget!
Regards, Pete"

(added 2/27/2008)
"My new machine is a 2008 MacPro 2.8GHz 8-core 2GB/750GB with 8800GT, shipped from Apple on 2/20/08 with OSX 10.5.1. I added 4GB RAM plus two more 750GB HDs (Seagate ST3750330AS) all from OWC. SoftRAID 3.6.6 is setup to use two HDs for both a striped logical volume and for a mirrored volume. The third HD is my maintenance boot drive and also is the Time Machine backup drive. The 10.5.2 combo and also the graphics update are applied.

So far this has been pure Mac which is to say it just works flawlessly. No wake from sleep problems.

The one glitch is a Seagate HD situation. I got one of the 750GB drives that reports "ST3_INVALID_PFM" for its media name instead of the correct "ST3750330AS" id. A number of folks have run into this. (See earlier reports on this below, including notes on firmware update/fix from Seagate (but no mac installer) - cache size was also misreported and one early thread thought performance was affected. Based on a report last week, I thought OWC had updated the firmware of all their 7200.10 stock.-Mike) So far its unclear to me whether this is a substantive problem or just a superficial glitch. As far as I can tell this HD is working just fine. SoftRAID hasn't complained. I created a tech support ticket with OWC to get their take on this.
Because of this HD question I haven't yet run the migration utility to transfer my old system to this new machine. More to follow if there is anything to report. Thanks for your www site.
-ct"

If I were buying a new SATA drive for a tower, I think I'd pick the ultra-dense (334GB/platter) Samsung F1 (based on Oliver's tests of 1TB HD drives) - the 750GB F1 is $150 on the site specials page.

(added 2/25/2008)
"Firstly thanks for running the site - I find it a really useful reference. To help pay this back I got the ram for my new system via your link to OWC...
To the meat of the email:
I have an early 2008 MacPro 2.8GHz 2gb/320GB with 8800GT I have it hooked up to a Compaq 2700VA UPS. Dell 2407WFPb (the "high colour" lcd - but I still see banding from an XP box w/ATI X850 or the Mac with 8800GT)

Factory install 10.5.1 upgraded via Software Update to 10.5.2
After a few days I added 4GB of OWC RAM & 3x 500GB Seagate Drives (ST3500320AS) - RAIDED.
I also purchased Hardware Monitor (www.bresink.com) - I like seeing the temps throughout the machine & fan rpms etc.

So far machine has performed flawlessly, no graphic artifacts, KP's of failure to rise from sleep.

This is the quietest machine I have owned since my Mac Plus - I can't get over how quiet it is - my 2002 Quicksilver roars like a monster in comparison.

I have yet to stress it to any degree, but it maintains ~55fps in WoW in Zangermarsh and ~115fps in Iron Forge outside the bank with every graphic option maxxed out.
Geekbench score 7727.

It runs VMWare a treat. I will be retiring my Dell quad xeon server with 5* 15K/rpm scsi-3 drives and running my virtual machines in the background (and enjoying the silence - the Dell is over 80Db according to my radio shack sound meter - which does not read low enough to measure the MacPro)

I feel VMWare runs so well for my needs that I might not need a bootcamp setup - if it would stop quitting - hope it becomes more stable very soon. Feature parity with the PC version would be nice too.

iPhoto is fast and smooth, the raid array sustains 155MB/sec - I have no buyers remorse.
Cheers, Phil"

(added 2/25/2008)
"I've had a stock configuration 2008 Mac Pro for almost exactly one month so far. Currently I've installed the newest 10.5.2 update as well as the graphics update. All was great for the first week and I only experiences some expected issues which I attributed to Leopard still being in it's infancy. Although, as time progressed I experienced about half a dozen total system freezes which required hard restarts. Half a dozen crashes is more than I had in 3 YEARS of Powerbook G4 ownership and I'm a bit upset about it. Issues ranged from random entering sleep while playing back a DVD, so display corruption while using spaces, and other freezes where I could still move the mouse but not select anything or force quit any applications or anything (which I've read might be due to the Radeon 2600 card).

I called Apple Support about my issues and they immediately told me to bring in my unit to be replaced with a new one, which I did the very next day. It's been three days with the new unit and I've already had 3 crashes where I can't force quit any applications but I can still move the mouse.

All in all, I love the Mac Pro, it's enough power to more than adequately handle all of my tasks, but I'm disappointed with the performance far and hope that these issues are resolved soon.
-Chris S."

(added 2/25/2008)
"I ordered a stock 2.8 8-core with a 8800GT on a Sunday and received a shipped e-mail on Tuesday. The hard drive is a Seagate, the DVD drive is a Pioneer and reuse a Seagate from my old G5. I also got 4GB (2X2) RAM and a Sonnet USB card from OWC.

I had it for almost a week. The only problem I have encountered was a freeze when I tried to rotate the screen 90 degrees. But, after the 10.5.2 and the Graphics update. The screen now just turns blank for a few seconds then reverts back to the original setting instead of freezing. I seldom use the portrait mode on my monitor anyway. :(

After reading many posts of the rebooting from sleep issue. I was a little concerned, but so far it has not happened. I don't have a UPS.

The Mac Pro is nice upgrade from a Dual 1.8 G5. The CPU temperature is half of the G5, uses less power than G5 and quieter. I would not be surprised if they put a quad-core in the next iMac. I'm also glade the fan on the 8800GT is silent. I dreaded having to replace the noisy fan like I did with the retail ATI 9800 pro in my G5. Hope you don't hear from me again.
-CL"

(added 2/25/2008)
"I have a 2008 Mac Pro, regular stock configuration (w/ATI 2600 card), and have not had any problems with it. I have used it both with and without the 10.5.2 update, and Graphics Update. No problems. Although, I don't notice any differences in the graphics after the Graphics Update.
My church secretary is impressed with the performance, and has not reported any problems with it.
(name withheld by request)"

(added 2/25/2008)
"Here is an update to my report of 2/8/08:
I installed the 10.5.2 update and the graphics update 12 days ago and my system has not had a single problem since then. Prior to this the PRAM reset seemed to have resolved my repeated wake from sleep problems.
I have not seen a graphics freeze issue since the updates and the glitch in time machine which caused all my incremental backups to be roughly the size of a full backup was also cured.

The only other change I made was that I screwed the monitor into the other port on the graphics card the last time I did an SMC reset over two weeks ago--I suppose there is a very remote possibility that this rather than the updates is the reason I have not had any more of the graphics freeze problems.
-Steven"

(added 2/25/2008)
"Hey Mike, Mac Pro Octo 2.8Ghz / 10 GB RAM / 10.5.2 (early 2008)
No more problems from restart on wake from sleep after PRAM zap. Thankfully there is xlr8yourmac because Apple's support site doesn't seem to have any documentation on this quite easy to solve issue.
By the way, my Mac is dead silent, seems like it's turned off. :)
Many Thanks to all of you!
-Emilio"

(added 2/25/2008)
" Hi Mike, I've had my 2008 Mac pro for a couple of weeks now. No problems whatsoever with the stock 2.8. I too, have been running dual montiors... 22" LaCie Blues since day one, and before ever firing it up, added two WD 500 drives and replaced the stock ram with a pair of OWC 2 gig sticks. Only wierdness has been trying to use migration assistant from my G5 2.0 dual. Three times the migration assistant quit mid way and gave an error, so have been doing it the hard way.
The Mac Pro has had all the 10.5.2 updates. I have it, the monitors and the G5 on the same 1500VA UPC.
Cheers, Pete"

(added 2/25/2008)
"I have a 2008 Mac Pro 3.0GHz with 14GB RAM and ATI 2600 running two 24" Dell monitors. The power is connected to an APC1500 UPS. So far no repetitive problems as others have described. It has crashed a couple times, but nothing consistent. At one point I had some digital funk on the monitors but only after I hooked up new DVI cables. After replacing the cables the problem went away.
I recently installed 10.5.2 and everything seems good, but now I'm leery of installing the the Graphics Update after reading the reports on your site. (10.5.2/Leopard graphics 1.0 feedback page had some reports from MacBook Pro and PB G4 owners on issues they saw with it - saying for them updates w/o it helped.) I want to be the guy that subscribes to "ain't broke, don't fix", but instead I've got an unnatural desire to install updates. Even though Apple has really reeked havoc in the pro video world with the last few QuickTime updates, I still follow the "newer is better" methodology. (At least I try not to blindly follow.)

It might also be worth mentioning that this a video/color correction workstation loaded with a Kona 3 card and a Highpoint SATA RAID card. The application Color (from Final Cut Studio) uses the GPU extensively, so the ATI 2600 gets a workout. That said, it is a relatively new computer and has seen a ton of work time, so I'll update you if anything changes. For now I think I'll hold off on the Graphics Update (but I really want to install it ;) ).
-Parke"

(added 2/25/2008)
"Subject: Early 2008 Mac Pro Problems / 2 monitor workaround really works!
I bought my Mac Pro 2.8ghz dual quad (with Ati 2600 HD video card) a week ago today, took it out of the box and experienced the graphics corruption/freeze problem immediately, the first thing i did was install all the leopard/graphics updates on the initial boot. The freeze was occurring every few hours or so. I wanted to write in because I think there is real validity to the two monitor workaround.
I was using the machine a lot last saturday and sunday with one monitor attached and it crashed about ten times in over about 15 hrs of use (the graphics corruption freeze with working mouse pointer). I read about the two monitor workaround, promptly hooked up a second, albeit cheesy, old lcd monitor and haven't had a single problem since and its been almost a week now of all uptime.

I have been posting a lot in apple discussions and it appears that everyone who hooked up a second monitor has not had the graphics corruption/lockup issue again. This makes the issue very interesting because we all may possibly have the same hardware but anyone who intended to use two monitors straight out the box may never realize that there is a problem. Also several people on the list didn't have a second monitor so they tried simply hooking up a second cable to the other dvi port, this does not appear to work. I urge anyone experiencing this problem to try the two monitor workaround and report back.
-Dave
Mac Pro (early 2008) 2x2.8 quad core, Ati 2600 gfx, 6gb ram"

(added 2/25/2008)
"Mike, A note about the 2600 freezes on the new mac pros. I purchased my stock 2.8 model the day after it was announced and have reported in the past I never had any problems or freezes. I should note I am running two monitors (an ACD 23" and a AD 20") and always have.
-Paul A."

(added 2/25/2008)
"Hi Mike, Wrote about a week ago about a macpro 3.0 ghz w/8800 GT video card. Had got the macpro on 2/12/08. At the time of writing had the machine for a couple of days running under 10.5.1. As stated before, machine was having some wake from sleep restarts. (common tip here since day 1 for this was a pram zap - some did a SMC reset also but PRAM zap alone fixes this per many readers comments, but I always wondered if that was a permanent fix (and wonder what's really affecting the nvram settings to cause this).-Mike)
Machine always hooked up to APC xs 1500 ups. At the time had just done smc, pram reset. Machine woke from sleep w/out issue about half the time after reset, no apparent pattern.
Have never had any screen freezes or computer lockups. Have left machine on continuous since. I finally replaced the apple seagate 320 gb drive w/a maxtor 500 gb drive. Upon plugging everything back in & starting up did the chime but nothing else just blue screen, did that a couple times w/no success. Finally unplugged all usb & firewire cables, machine restarted fine. Have not seen that problem in quite a while over 3 past machines. So did another pram reset 3 times repeatedly as back in the old days of doing it. (OF reset is more complete but as always (since the early days of the mac) - hold the keys down on a pram zap until you hear the startup bong 3 times) Everything fine again. Still a few restart waking from sleep events.
Had been reading the threads on the apple forums on this, they are quite extensive, read people were having problem even hooked up directly to wall sockets. Also read a couple posts stating attempts to wake from sleep with power button on tower instead of mouse or keyboard, seemed to stop problem. Have tried that for the last 3 days & have had no restart after wake from sleep events since. Hope that's the end of it- fingers crossed.

Also installed 10.5.2 & leopard graphic update today. Really see no difference in anything so far other than time machine menu item. If anything changes w/that I'll wright again.
-Paul."

(added 2/25/2008)
"My first Mac Pro (2 x 2.8GHz Quad, 320G, ATI 2600) was DOA. Power, light and fans, but no startup tone, no open firmware, no OS. Reseated everything, no luck. The vendor made an exception for me and took it back. Upon finding this site's Mac Pro report (Thanks!) I had them replace (at my additional cost) with the next model up (2 x 2.8GHz Quad, 320G, Nvidia 8800).

I replaced (added to) the Western Digital 320GB with a pair of Seagate 500G 7200.11 (rev.SD15 from OWC) running a striped RAID and added 2 pairs of 2GB chips. Installed from the DVD's to the RAID, so I never really tested it straight out of the box. It's plugged-in to an APC Smart-UPS 750.

Result: couldn't be happier. Yes, the first box buzzkill disappointed me, and that Apple wouldn't just swap with me (pointed me back to my reseller) was also a bummer, but now that's water over the bridge, this Mac Pro is really fast, and runs Parallels nicely. No wake from sleep issues (tested nightly now for a week). No video artifacts (10.5.2 + Graphics update installed). Quiet. Easy to upgrade.

One gripe, I guess, is that the internal speaker is wimpy. This thing performs like a Matt Damon character, but sounds like Nicole Ritchie. Great work on this site BTW.
- Tom"

(added 2/25/2008)
"This may be of some interest to you. I ran into an interesting if not annoying FW video compatibility problem. I tried to catalog a DVT via iDive for the first time after the upgrade and found it could control my camera deck but not see any video. iMovie and QT pro was able to grab video, but neither iDive nor FCP. These apps have their latest updates and 10.5.2 with the graphics thing. After a few hours google searching I tried disconnected the external FW800 Big Lacie drive and things are working better. I had the camera connected to the front FW 400 port, capturing to an internal drive, but a drive connected on the rear FW 800 port is interfering? Strange... but I'm sure this is not the end of it.
-Sam"

(added 2/22/2008)
"Over the last day or so I've been chasing down kernel panics, this is on a new Mac Pro (2008), 2.8GHz, 6GB RAM. 10.5.2 with all the updates, video card the ATI Radeon HD2600XT stocker. I hadn't noticed a problem until I ran an iPhoto full screen slide show on my 24" Samsung monitor. Crash, and I could repeat it with Entourage, Safari, PS CS3 and iPhoto open. I yanked the added OWC 4GB RAM out, still broke, so OWC still RULES!, but then I did a Google on one of the backtrace contention terms. Bingo, found a thread at Apple where a couple days ago someone else hit the same issue. Identical log data.. He had reloaded from 10.5.1, omitting the Graphics Update 1.0, and it cured his.
Worth a shot, so I tried it. All better now. something in that Graphics Update is breaking the system. I just ran a 900 image slide show, full screen for 45 minutes, no problem.. Learned a lot about kernel panics along the way, but the real key... Google.. Saved a lot of phone time.
-geOrge"

Report back in a week or two if you're still not seeing any problems. Some (more than a few) have had the problem since day one (before Leopard Graphics update/10.5.2) but if anyone else finds 10.5.2 w/o Graphics update helps let me know. (So far all the feedback on 10.5.2 from those that had the problem said it didn't help.) The 10.5.2 page had some notes about the Leopard Graphics update being blamed for clamshell mode issues w/MacBook Pros and DVD Player problems with some PB G4s also.

(added 2/22/2008)
"Another update on trying to investigate the ATI 2600 freeze issue. So far I get the freeze every 1-2 days, not several times a day or hour like others. So I'm still tolerating it hoping for a breakthrough. My 14-day exchange expired before the problems manifested. I've got AppleCare so not without some recourse when I throw in the towel.

It occurred to me there is a remote possibility that some ATI cards might have a physical defect. (the last batch of X800s had a higher than normal number of vram/display problems.) I thought it would be worth investigating to see if the physical act of having two connectors attached to the card might produce a beneficial stress that caused the electrical/signal behavior to become normal. If that were happening it wouldn't be obvious to the people who are driving dual monitors or driving a single monitor with dual inputs...

I don't have two monitors to drive, just a 20" ACD with its single DVI cable. So I attached a DVI-to-VGA adapter to the secondary port and let it dangle... That experiment failed in less than 24 hours. And, wow, I didn't realize there are so many variations on corrupt graphics output.

First it was just the top window in Safari, then after awhile the whole screen became corrupt -- pixels were dancing like Mardi Gras everywhere. Mouse could control cursor but clicks and keyboard input ignored. Eventually had to hard shutdown.

System.log caught the GPU dump, and this time there was also a loop of callback_client errors and user dropped events that corresponded in time to the accumulating corruption after the initial event -- perhaps this is a new clue? Or just an artifact of the GPU causing system chaos?...
I've added new images and the syslog to (this page on Freeze Saga).
I'm happy for the people who have new cards or machines and so far so good -- but my machine ran swell for the first 3 weeks then the trouble began. I'd love to hear from anyone who has had their replacement for at least 3 weeks and hasn't looked back.
-Ron"

(added 2/22/2008)
"I am running two Apple 30in Cinemas on mine. Maybe that's why I never experienced any lockups. I've run 2 monitors since the day I bought the computer.
-Gene "

(added 2/22/2008 - updated 2/23/2008)
"I ordered my 3.2 ghz Mac Pro with 320 Gb HD, NVidia 8800, and 2GB Ram on Jan 29 and received it on Feb 10. Much faster than the 3-4 week promised delivery date so my planned upgrades have not yet arrived. I have two 4GB memory boards coming in during the next few day along with two Seagate TB drives. My new machine named Pisces is insanely fast bit definately could use more memory. I plan to add another 8 GB next month and sell the orginal 2 GB on eBay.

I installed two updates (assuming 10.5.2/Leopard Graphics Update 1.0) and the machine began to lock up on me which meant pulling the plug. Using the disk tool to investigate Apple recommended a full wipe and reinstall of the OS, however it has not given me any trouble since running this utility. This is not a huge problem for me as I planned to reinstall the OS on one of the new Seagate drives.

The only other problem I had was importing pictures into iPhoto. I must have used two different user accounts so the database was corrupted. My fix was to use the console window and open up the permissions using the chmod command. I am new to Mac but have a Solaris background. I am thrilled to have shell access like my Sun machine.

It has taken a little time to get used to having pull down menus at the top of the screen an not being able to resize window as easily as XP or Solaris. I hate those aspects. I am not impressed with the wireless mouse, no right click, but I expect this might just need a little configuring or an after market mouse to make me happy. (Most of us use std USB 2 button mice.-Mike) I am thrilled with the wireless keyboard. It is small, with a great touch and impressive design.

I love my Mac. I waited for the new Harpertown chips and paid the premium for the fast CPU's, and I'm happy with the decision. I feel this machine will last ten years or more.
(he later wrote)
I do have the wake from sleep problem. (restart on wake from sleep - suggested he try a PRAM zap that many have said helped.) I know that my hard drive has errors, I'm nearly done reinstalling the OS on a new drive. I'll let you know how that plays out. Two TB drives set as a mirror. I have a single Dell 24" monitor.
I've had a few residual attracts on the screen that moving another window over and gets rid of. My windows machine goes through a bit of resizing and junk when switching to it by changing the cable over. I have three machines and not enough ways to connect. If I wasn't changing back and forth it would be a non issue. I'll try the Pram zap too.
-Conrad"

Follow-up from an owner that had seen the graphics corruption/freezes and mentioned an apple thread on running dual-monitor mode earlier:

(added 2/21/2008 - from 2/20 mail)
"It's still too early to be sure, but it looks like the two-monitor solution is a viable fix for the 2008 Mac Pro ATI 2600 freezing issue. Nobody who has tried it has reported any freezes since and today I gave my system the "acid test" by running Carbon Copy Cloner and leaving the progress screen active on my desktop: every other time I've tried that with a single monitor the system has locked up within 3 minutes, today it ran perfectly without issue right to the end.

I would try going back to a single monitor and trying it again but I'm sure it would freeze and then I'd have the potential of file corruption to deal with if I shut down and a waste of quite a bit of time if I don't. So "if it ain't broke don't fix it" and with 2 monitors the system seems to be "not broken." More later if anything new develops. Take care of that back!
(he later wrote)
It's now seven days since I added the second monitor to my 2008 Mac Pro setup and I have not had a freeze since plugging in the second screen. Others are posting the same result on Apple Discussions. My particular system used to go 48 to 72 hours between freezes, then I'd often get one two or even three lockups in short order (within an hour) and then back to stable running for another few days. At no time between getting the machine and adding the 2nd screen did it go longer than 96 hours without a lockup, however, so my current 168 and counting is significant, I think. Add the Carbon Copy Cloner "acid test" I already wrote about and while not definitive I'd say adding a second monitor is well worth trying for those experiencing the issue.
Best, Tim"

If anyone else finds this helps (after say a week or two of use) let me know.

(added 2/21/2008 from 2/20 mail)
"Just to report that I'm also experiencing the sleep/reboot problem with my 5 days old Mac Pro. (I asked if he'd tried the original tips many said helped - i.e. zapping the PRAM-Mike) The configuration is 2 x 3Ghz, 8800 GT, 10GB RAM, WD 320GB + Seagate 500GB 7200.11.
For the moment, this is the only problem I have with it.
I don't know if I have to change it right now, or to wait for a software update. I think I'm not ready for asking a refund for this sleeping beauty.
Thanks, Jeremie"

(added 2/21/2008 - updated 2/23/2008)
"I have a Mac Pro 2.8 GHz 8 core with with an 8800GT. It crashes on wake from sleep - sometimes with the graphics corruption issue, and sometimes with a reboot.
The graphics crashes give me a graphics channel error:

kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 0000000c
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00200000 00005097 0000047c 00000000
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00000486 00001b0c 1000f010 0000007e
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 00000000
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 0000000c
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00200000 00005097 0000047c 00000000
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00000486 00001b0c 1000f010 00000003
Feb 16 17:20:09 MyHostName kernel[0]: 00000000 00000000 00000000
Feb 16 17:20:21 MyHostName kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Feb 16 17:20:21 MyHostName kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel
exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Feb 16 17:20:21 MyHostName kernel[0]: 0000000b

My crashes with reboot on wake from sleep do not leave any information in the system log about why the crash occured, only that one did so.
(he later wrote)
An update - following the replacement of my display, an SMC reset and a PRAM zap, I have not had any more crashes on wake from sleep or graphics corruption.
I have, however experienced a new problem where my machine, which sleeps perfectly if I tell it to manually, does not sleep after my specified period of inactivity (although the display does go blank, but does not start pulsing its sleep light.)
-Michael"

Many readers over time here have said a PRAM zap fixed the reboot on wake issue (some also did an SMC reset but PRAM zap alone helped many) - even some that said it reappeared after 10.5.2/leopard graphics update install later said a pram zap helped again.
But for graphics corruption/freeze issue, nothing seems a real fix, although one reader said running dual monitors on this 2600 card seems to have helped (but still early to tell IMHO)

(added 2/21/2008 from 2/20 mail)
"Hey Mike, Just got my Mac Pro (shipping was delayed because of the 8800 GT, but it ended up shipping 10 days earlier than expected):
Dual 2.8 GHZ (8-core), 8800 GT, 6GB of RAM (4 GB from Ramjet, more on the way), 500 GB SATA Drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 from Apple), 750 GB SATA Drive (Hitachi 7K1000)
I immediately applied 10.5.2 and the Graphics Update. So far everything is rock solid, and very fluid. If it wasn't for the hard drives it would be almost silent. Startup times are extremely short and starting applications is one or two bounce max. I haven't been sleeping, so I don't know if I have the restart problem.

I also received the same setup, except with the HD 2600 and less RAM, at work today. I'll send you more details and let you know if I notice any significant difference between the two as I use them over the next week.
-Evan"

(added 2/21/2008 - from 2/20 mail)
"I have the ATI 2600 freezing problem with 10.5.2. (So far nobody that had these problems said the updates helped - ref: reports on the 10.5.2 feedback page/2008 Mac Pro section.-Mike) And all updates!
I have an Mac Pro with TWO ATI 2600 and only the one in the second slot (with more air to cool) makes the crashes. (How do you know it's that card? - only that display's image shows corruption? Even those with single cards have had the problem also.-Mike) So I think no heat or SW problems...I changed the memory es well and no help.... So I think it is a ATI 2600 Firmware problem....which only some cards have!
I hope Apple reacts fast...
-Andreas R."

After reports on this problem literally from day one, I'd hoped that the 10.5.2/Leopard graphics update would have helped but again so far nobody with the problems has said it did.

(added 2/19/2008)
"An update to my Feb-6-08 report, I'm still experiencing random GPU problems on a Mac Pro 2008 with ATI Radeon HD 2600. I have tried many things
Remove all peripherals except keyboard, mouse and monitor
Eliminate any 3rd party software
Zap PRAM, Reset SMC (several times while swapping h/w)
Reseat ATI card
Remove all add-on RAM and disks -- restore to original OEM config
Run AHT, Rember, fsck -- all good
Clean install from OEM discs (not retail)
Quicktime 7.4.1
Combo update 10.5.2
WebObjects Update 5.4.1 for Mac OS X 10.5
Leopard Graphics Update 1.0
iLife Support 8.2
Repair permissions, force pre-binding
Swap monitor cable from bottom connector to top connector of ATI card

For a few days had episodes of screen corruption, but not lock-ups or GPU hex dumps. Then tonight I had a tiny bit of screen corruption that dumped the GPU and required hard shutdown.
I have begun posting my photos at
http://web.mac.com/sailhome/SailhomeMacZ/MacPro.html
in case others find it helpful.

I'm reluctant to go for a card swap or machine swap at this point -- I'm reading reports from people who get their swaps and still have the problems. And it seems their replacement options become restrictive after their first swaps. Hoping a reliable fix is found so I can act on it with efficiency, but bumping against these dumps isn't exactly efficient... Maybe those folks with two monitors are zeroing in on something. By the way, I've stopped worrying about RAM temps :-) Thanks again for your site
-Ron"

(added 2/18/2008)
" Hi Mike, Just received my 2008 MacPro 3.ghz. w/8800 gt video on 2/12/08 (ordered in on 1/16/08). Came with stock 2 gigs ram & 320 gb seagate drive, sys 10.5.1, airport card installed, with apple wireless keyboard & usb modem.
Right out of the box before starting up I added 3 additional maxtor maxline pro 500 gb enterprise drives & 8GB 800 mhz. ram from OWC, installed the four 2GB modules in slot 1 & 2 on both memory risers and the 2 apple memory modules in position 3&4 on upper card riser A. Maxtor in bay 2 partitioned into 3 partitions including 1 startup. Apple seagate in bay 1 partitioned into 4 partitions incl. 1 startup. Striped 2 maxtors in bay 3 & 4 with a startup sytem on it as well. Ram total is 10 gb.
Attempted to migrate my stuff during setup via firewire disk mode, from one of my partitions on my MDD, but the migration assistant would not show me the partition I wanted to migrate off of. As it is there are 17 partitions on 4 drives on the MDD, I maintain a very flexible setup on the MDD - it basically has almost every version of apple OS since system 9 and application known to man. (I still think that the MDD-OS 9 bootable, was one of the all time greatest and most versatile apple computers they ever made IMHO.) Ended up migrating from my aluminum Powerbook 17" 1.67GHz, non high rez. instead, via firewire target mode w/out any problems.

Startup was uneventfull went without issues. Machine is very quiet in my opinion. It sits next to a dual 1.25 ghz. MDD. which is noticeably louder. In fact with the MDD off & OWC Raid dual drive external firewire 800 case on, as well as the macpro on - you can only hear the fan in the OWC case. Have 2 Gateway fhd2400 24" monitors (can't believe I bought a Gateway anything, but those monitors are gorgeous and very versatile, love them) hooked up to the macpro via dvi & MDD hooked up to same monitors with vga. Everything seems fine.

MacPro & monitors and other stuff like printer, scanner, powerbook, dual drive raid case etc are on an APC XS 1500 UPS. The MDD as well as a USB hub and some other stuff are on a APC XS 1000. Have not done any updates at all yet. Machine is very snappy. Apps launch very fast, Final Cut Studio loads with 15 separate video clips in a project, very fast. Have not done any rendering w/compressor yet- dying to see performance. Although reading on Barefeats.com yesterday-they had some comparisons in the apple pro apps on the new MacPros w/8800 gt compared to the ati 2600 & ati x1800 , with the 8800gt coming in suprisingly slower according to the numbers. Hoping they optimize drivers for the 8800.

From the get go tried putting machine to sleep & waking while on the APC 1500 ups, machine would not wake normally w/out restarting. Drives set not to sleep, and computer NOT set to restart after power failure. Did not try w/out UPS connected. Did the pram reset as well as the sms reset and it seems like it cleared it up - it has not happened since, but have only tried for a day, will see what happens after a few days & multiple wakes.

Only odd thing is the bonjour airport express printer via Epson R1800 guttenberg print driver, prints are very faded out as if ink was almost out. Same printer via usb or firewire prints fine. Delete the guttenberg airport bonjour printer and reselect the epson spr 1800 (v. 6.12- 12/18/07 driver/latest) via Airport Express for bonjour and print job starts to feed paper but hangs, have to reset the printer itself to clear. MacPro has installed airport card also. No difference if ethernet or airport card used via airport express connected r1800. I will have to sort that out eventually.

Other than that I love the machine, disk access is fast, everything so far works like a charm. I'll write back if 10.5.2 and graphic update change anything. Mike, as always great site, thanks for keeping it up.
-Paul"

(added 2/18/2008)
"Mike, Here's an update to my report from Feb 4th. re:freeze with the HD2600 XT in the MacPro 2.8GHz As mentioned in that report, I left the computer at my local Apple Store on Feb 4 for six days for them to 'stress test' it and see if they could cause the freeze with pixilation of the display. They had no luck replicating the problem, so I picked it up. I told them if it happened again, I'd take a picture of the frozen/corrupted screen and bring it back.

So, I brought it home. The 10.5.2 Update came out the next day, so I re-formatted & installed a completely clean install of 10.5.1 followed by the Combo Updater to 10.5.2, along with the Graphics update. Brought the system fully current with all updates. Over the last ten days have been doing my usual video and sound editing, everything's been solid. No problems waking from sleep. I even spent a day installing 64bit Windows XP Pro on it to see if it would work (it does, as long as it's on a separate drive, not a partition of an otherwise Mac formatted drive). So, I figure maybe just one of those things, I'm a pretty happy camper.

Then today, after eight flawless days, it froze again! Unfortunately, without any artifacts so I couldn't document with a photo. The mouse still worked BTW. It froze shortly after awaking it from sleep, when I tried to add the new folder to the Dock, with a few lines flashing across the display that disappeared just as it froze.

Rebooted, cleared the SMC and PRAM, and about a hour and a half later it did it again. Opened up the log in console and it showed the "GPU Debug" entries right at the time of the two freezes. Took it back to the Apple Store today, showed the logs to a very helpful rep at the Genius Bar -- he swapped out my ATI card for one from a floor unit to tide me over and ordered me a replacement that should be in at the end of the week. He admitted at least one other customer had the same problem. Given the time he spent checking things at his station and going to the back, I'm guessing that word is getting around to the tech help that this really is an issue.
-Manny"

(added 2/18/2008)
"One of the numerous threads on the 2008 Mac Pro freezing issue has recently gotten very active and seems to have hit "critical mass" as the core thread to follow on this issue, which I've been doing. You'll find it here: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1365277
(There's several other Apple forum threads on 2008 Mac Pro graphics issues/freezing in the threads linked in another readers's petition to apple to fix these problems.-Mike)

Somebody there suggested a possible workaround is to connect a second monitor: as improbable as that may seem it does appear to work. It's too early to be 100% positive, but most of the "hitching" of the video in World of Warcraft is gone since I added a 24" Acer LCD to the 30" CD, (a 2nd display splits use of the vram - don't know why that would help, although some games may turn off the 2nd display when running-Mike) and that was also an early indication that the Al iMac firmware update had finally managed to address the problem on that model. Obviously I've had no freezes since, about 48 hours ago now & counting.(he later wrote a 2nd monitor didn't solve this, I didn't think it would - see below)

Also since the 10.5.2 & graphics update I was getting severe "flashing" in WoW scenes which rendered a lot of oranges, browns, or dark reds: it was so bad it made the game hard to play but it has gotten much much (99% - but not perfect) better since adding the second monitor.

(he later wrote)
Turns out I was a little optimistic in my earlier e-mail; while running two monitors has still prevented the freeze (so far) since the 10.5.2 and graphics update I continue to have issues with large pieces of the terrain flashing or fluorescing at random intervals in World of Warcraft; it happens most with brightly lit areas that have a lot of green/yellow/brown in them, and got markedly worse after the updates. Running two monitors does seem to help, but on further play maybe only about 50% better, not 99% as I said before.
-Tim L."

(added 2/18/2008)
"Got my new Mac Pro on Thursday evening. It's a 1-chip quad-core 2.8GHz model, with 8800GT. Got it with 2GB memory from Apple, added another 2GB from OWC.
Nearly everything has gone as smoothly as I had hoped. Migration from my old machine went quite quickly over FW800, all but one of my apps worked fine on arrival. The only problem is that VersionTracker Pro keeps forgetting its registration information. Wiping the preferences file and rebuilding didn't help. Later on I'll try a fresh install, and see if that works better.

Graphics are fast (as one would expect). Aperture 1.5 runs waaaaaay faster than it did on my Dual 1.42GHz FW800 G4 MDD (with Radeon 9800Pro). It's really sweet!

I have one really mysterious problem, however. I have a WD Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS SATA disk (750GB) that I've been using in an external case. It's been working fine in that mode with both old and new computers. When I tried installing it in the Mac Pro I'm told that I inserted an unreadable disk. Disk Utility can't format it. It shows up in the list of mechanisms in DU, but any attempt to format it just hangs forever.

I've tried a bunch of troubleshooting of this problem: It fails in all four bays. The original drive works fine in all four bays. After reading about possible issues with spread spectrum clocking, I tried jumpered with SSC off (that's how it was originally) and with SSC on (just in case I misread the jumper info on the drive) -- no difference in either mode. (SSC enabled drives were not onboard Mac SATA compatible in the past (originally mentioned as a problem here a couple years ago when some early 7200.9 Seagate's shipped w/SSC enabled) - not sure on the new Mac Pros but I'd definitely confirm SSC disabled on the drive.-Mike) It just doesn't want to talk to the Mac Pro (or maybe vice versa). If any of your readers have any advice, I'd love to hear it.
-Dean S."

I'd go to WD's site and verify the SSC (disabled) setting (some drives in the past didn't have jumpers for that - requiring a (PC/windows) utility to disable it.) BTW - although some macs ship with WD OEM SATA drives, as mentioned last winter here unless they updated it, the WD interface/compat. page at their site listed no SATA drives as compatible with Macs. (clearly wrong - but maybe it's an old doc not updated, as there were some issues with their first WD4000 series and 2nd series of Raptor drives in some G5s (although a few used them OK, many noted freezes/problems during large file copies for instance as mentioned in a page here and FAQ item from 2006.) But many readers have used WD SATA drives since then w/o any problems noted that I recall. (Drive db reports and even my refurb AL iMac shipped with a WD SATA 320GB drive.)

(added 2/18/2008)
"I picked up my BTO MacPro Saturday, one business day ahead of apple's original delivery estimate when I ordered it in mid Jan.
Two 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 2GB (2x1GB) RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA
One 16x SuperDrive, AirPort Extreme Card (Wi-Fi)

I added 4 GB of RAM, a new 750GB drive and reused two 200GB drives from the old GB G4 configured as a raid set, took about maybe 5 minutes. This tower is a breeze to get into compared to the GB ethernet G4. I'm running off of a Cyberpower 1500 VA UPS, which shows about a 40% of capacity load. The USB control/status port is connected and energy save recognizes the UPS and reports its status. No problems with sleep yet. The display is apple's 23 inch cinema model. I have external FW 800 and 400 drives connected.

I moved the Apple RAM stick to one riser and installed the two 2GB sticks on the other riser but failed to put the apple RAM riser in slot B. On first boot, the memory check failed for the riser with Apple RAM. After I swapped risers, all 6 GB of RAM checked out.

The OS recognized the old raid set without issue. It has the APM partition map which I'll deal with that later if necessary as its not the boot disk. I use it for scratch.

I tried to reuse my DVR/DVD-RAM drive in the bottom bay but, of course, the tray interferes with the MacPro door. Oh well.

The FCP Studio install process failed about mid way through as if the disk was damaged. After pulling the DVD RAM disk out of the second drive, FCP installed without issue, took a couple hours. Initially DVD SP wanted to burn to the bottom drive and got confused when I put the blank in the top drive. After I disconnected the bottom drive entirely, there was no issue. Both drives were set to cable select.

The wireless mouse cursor disappeared while encoding a FCP project. Would not come back , so I plugged in a USB mouse. When I turned the mouse off, I did get the bluetooth mouse disconnect notice. After a restart, the wireless mouse worked again.

I upgraded a small FCP project, converted into HD and burned about 45 minutes of HD video without any other incident. The disk plays just fine. This baby is noticeably faster than the dual 1.2Ghz upgraded so-called gigabit G4 it replaces (still running OS10.3.9 for app compatibilty). Encoding and compressing video now takes about 20% of the dual G4 time in my unscientific test.

I'm most impressed with the dead silence, except for the occasional disk access. All the internal drives are Seagates, the Apple supplied 500 GB is a 7200.10 model, the 750 GB is a 7200.11 model that reports an invalid part number (Ref: issue with some firmware versions (misreported drive model and cache size issue - fixed in AD14 firmware or later.-Mike) but otherwise operates ok, the two older drives are 200GB 7200.7s
For about an hour last night, airport was doing a lot of scanning and not providing much data rate. (What sort of Wireless network do you have?)
-Sam"

Another follow-up from a reader that had graphics/freezing problems previously reported:

(added 2/18/2008)
"A further update: Mac authorized a replacement, stating that it was a hardware issue. They said that I should either get a replacement at one of the service center / stores, or get a shipped replacement directly from Apple. But, no replacement is available at the store from which I bought the unit. Calling back Apple, they did not want to FedEx overnight a replacement unit, but instead want me to wait until the store gets another unit (~10 business days).
The irritating point is that the Product Specialist, who claimed to be the highest level in Apple Care:
a) did not know about the freezing display issue,
b) did not want to let me speak with a supervisor claiming there is none.
He provided his contact information: Stephen Jaikaran, sjaikaran@apple.com, 800-275-2273, x89, 85807.
-Lukas C."

(added 2/18/2008)
"I just got my new MacPro 8 core 3.0 yesterday. I migrated from a 6.5 year old ppc Mac without any problems. In fact I was shocked at how well migration assistant worked. 10.5.1 is on the system and will upgrade to 10.5.2 probably tomorrow. I ordered with the 8800GT card and 4GB of ram with one 500G HD.
I will be ordering 4GB more ram and 1 or 2 more drives. I can't believe how quiet this machine is. It run great and have had no problems or any sort.
-goodman studio "

(added 2/18/2008)
"I've had my stock 2008 Mac Pro 2.8 with ATI 2600 graphics card for 2 weeks. Recently installed 16GB (8x 2GB) OWC RAM and 2 extra Hitachi 1TB HD's.
My 1st terminal crash happened today, but I've experienced since day one, occasional glitches where graphic artifacts appear. Mostly while using Lightroom, never in Photoshop CS3 - which I'm currently using 80% of the time. Although once it did occur with no applications open, just navigating in Finder.
Much the same as other owners have described. The system locked and the screen displayed dancing artifacts. After two minutes the blue death screen appeared for a while then reverted to a static screen where only the mouse pointer could be moved (see photo).

I have not updated to 10.5.2 due to my monthly bandwidth restrictions (viva $outh Africa!) but it seems there's no rush anyway, with no fix apparent. Keeping my calm, for now.
-CJM"

(added 2/15/2008)
"Hey XLR8yourMac, here's another 2008 Mac Pro with 8800GT report for you.
I got mine yesterday. It's a stock 2.8 8 core with the 500GB HD and the 8800GT, display is a dell 2407WFP HC, and both the display and the Mac are running off of a APC Back-UPS XS1500. I installed a second DVD burner, 3 more HD's and 8 GB of OWC ram for 10 GB total.
Then I installed vista 64bit and played Crysis at 1920x1200 for awhile... :) Very smooth, with all options set to high, except for shadows, physics, and shaders set to medium. No AA. I probably could have bumped the shaders to high, but it got just a bit chunky.

My final test for the first day was to sleep it from OS X (10.5.2 with the graphics update installed) overnight. It woke up successfully this morning.

I've had no problems or glitches at all, but I have run into a software support issue - Vmware Fusion will not properly boot your boot camp partition if you've installed a 64bit version of windows or vista. Fusion will boot, but will complain that you're running a 64bit OS in a 32bit VM. Then, when I booted Vista natively again, my nvidia drivers were hosed and had to be uninstalled/reinstalled.
I checked with Vmware, and their response was that apple doesn't support Vista 64bit on boot camp. I pointed them to the installation pdf that specifically says Vista 64bit is supported on Mac Pro's. No response from Vmware on that yet.
-Nick K."

(added 2/15/2008)
"Not too much to say yet, but I have the 2.8GHz machine with an 8800GT and it has woken repeatedly off different drives and installs with no issues so far. Machine is fast, and aside from the RAM layout (putting 1 pair on each card seemed odd to me, though the machine didn't fail to boot-just ignored the RAM). So far so good-and dang quick.
-Mike"

Glad to hear it (most only write about problems). He later wrote he had not updated yet to 10.5.2/Leopard Graphics Update. (as noted below in first 8800GT report, it shipped with a later build of 10.5.1 than earlier shipments did.)

(added 2/15/2008, from 2/14 mail)
"I got my new Mac Pro last night with the 8800 graphics Card. I am running two Samsung 24-inch displays 1200X1920. I have a PC next to the mac, and initially ran one monitor DVI from Mac and one monitor in VGA. The PC supplies the monitors the opposite signal. I do this so I can switch between them while both are running.

I upgraded to 10.5.2 and then updated the Graphics update. Right after the graphics update the VGA monitor had all sorts of noise and lines. I switched the Mac to running both on DVI, and have seen no more issues (The PC is now on VGA to both not quite as crisp either lol)

I also right out of the box, put in two Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache drives as a Stripped RAID and loaded Leopard on them as the main drive. I also put in 4Gig more ram from OWC before I even turned the Mac Pro on. I am loading Pro Apps this weekend and will let you know how it all compares to my Digital Audio G4 (upgraded to as good as I can get it) I am running MOTU 2408 with a PCI-X card that was put in prior to initial turn on too. No issues so far audio wise.
-Jules R."

Also added this to the 10.5.2 reports page. (Other 10.5.2/Leopard graphics update feedback from previous 2008 Mac Pro owners are listed in the 2008 Mac Pro section of the 10.5.2 feedback page.)

(added 2/14/2008 - updated 2/26)
"Hi Mike, here are my observations regarding the MacPro sleep/restart issue:
I received my 8x2.8GHz MacPro two days ago. Only change to the default configuration was an additional Samsung HD - I still have to wait for the extra RAM and the Nvidia 8800GT to arrive. I started with a clean slate and installed 10.5.2 (9c31), the graphics update, dev tools and some apps (but no 3rd party drivers, kexts or other stuff). Almost every wake from sleep lead to a restart so I decided to reset the SMC and zap the PRAM. Since then wake from sleep has been working fine (and I hope it'll continue to do so).

CPU Performance is like expected (CB scores > 18000). I had the impression that Xcode doesn't benefit from the eight cores as much as I would have expected, but this seem to be an Xcode issue because it isn't even close to maxing out all cores. To me the 2008 MacPro appears to be at least as quiet as the four core MP I used before. I'm skeptical though regarding the 2600XT's fan and think it'll get noisy after some time.
(on Feb 26 he wrote)
FYI: About a week after the SMC/PRAM reset the restart after sleep problem reappeared (HW config & OS unchanged). I guess I'll have to wait for a MacPro firmware update to fix this.
-Sven"

(added 2/14/2008)
"hi Mike, My new MacPro (Quadcore 2.8GHz, ATI 2600, 2GB RAM, 320GB) arrived this morning.
I just used the Maxtor 6L200 from my old G5 (10.5.2 + graphics, APM formatted!), started the MacPro and it already works for 4 hours without any problem (no update needed).
The MacPro is a lot quieter (and ofcourse faster) than my G5.
cheers, Jako "

I sent Jako a note that the APM formatted drive (per Apple kbase doc and some past reader confirmations) will be a problem if you ever try to apply a firmware update (and one reader said he could not install Bootcamp on an APM drive). Eventually I suspect apple will release firmware updates for the 2008 Mac pros - as they did for previous models over time. Some have used a 2nd drive (internal or external) correctly formatted to apply updates but just a FYI.

(added 2/13/2008)
"Mac Pro w/ nvidia 8800GT
Mine arrived today. already got it up and running with a seagate 7200.11 1TB as a primary boot drive formated in two partitions 500/500 with Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Vista 64 ultimate. And the apple oem WD 320GB formated as a separate Fat32 documents drive (it works in OS X and vista as read and write, which was the point, although vista complains a little bit about the partition of drive being un-standard (probably the fact it's a 320 gig FAT32 partition which really anything over 32GB is unstandard, but can thank OS X's poor NTFS driver for that hack). Unstandard as it may be, my wacky config works pretty well.
The 1TB seagate I got from OWC already had appropriate firmware on it and did not need to be flashed for the 32meg cache issue thankfully, although since i had a windows boot already setup I was prepared to do so if needed. No hangs or major issues so far but I have observed some graphical distortions from time to time. like this one below (iChat Border)

As you can see the metal appearance around the window did not redraw properly and caused many black lines to appear through it. Note that the bluring is not a distortion, merely a protection of privacy as this happened on an ichat window. (I made the inner window solid yellow, but the smeared chat with name remains)

I have also observed during playing of world of warcraft that when moving fast, such as on a mount, i can observe a single line starting at bottom of screen then moving up to the top of screen, then repeating over and over again, only happens when terrain is moving quickly. it's clear and only distorts about a 5 pixel height at most, but goes across the screen and goes from bottom to top over and over again. it's enough to ignore it as another minor graphical quirk.

Another thing to note that I don't think anyones mentioned. The 2008 Mac Pro ships with Boot Camp 2.0.2, the Setup Assistant is still labeled at 2.0 and only visible difference is included drivers for windows hardware. The version displayed in Boot Camp Control Panel in Windows is 2.0.2. All drivers minus video card installed on Vista 64 bit. For video card it's using Microsoft generics, but I plan to test out actual nvidia driver set when I play with vista some more. I only installed it to check seagate firmware for time being.

Here is a system profiler readout. For some odd reason, system profiler is ignoring my NTFS Vista partition, Finder shows it and Startup Disk pref pane shows it, and Disk Utility shows it but does not honor volume name, instead displays the disk ID. I plan to look into this further to see if Vista did anything funky with it.
-Adam W.
Apple system profiler (info trimmed to save space)
Hardware Overview:
Boot ROM Version: MP31.006C.B02 SMC Version: 1.25f4 Serial Number: G88060XXXXX (suffix letters X'd)

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT:
Chipset Model: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT
Bus: PCIe
Slot: Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 512 MB
Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)
Device ID: 0x0611
Revision ID: 0x00a2
ROM Revision: 3233
Displays:
Cinema:
Display Type: LCD
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Depth: 32-bit Color
Core Image: Hardware Accelerated
Main Display: Yes
Quartz Extreme: Supported
Rotation: Supported

Intel ESB2 AHCI:
Product: ESB2 AHCI
Speed: 3.0 Gigabit
Description: AHCI Version 1.10 Supported
ST31000340AS:
Capacity: 931.51 GB
Model: ST31000340AS
Revision: AD14
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified"

More 2008 Mac Pro feedback w/10.5.2/Leopard Graphics Update: FYI - more feedback added to the 10.5.2 reports page/2008 Mac Pro section this morning. (Feb 13th.)

OS X 10.5.2 and Leopard Graphics Update released: (Feb 11th afternoon) Apple released 10.5.2 (shows build 9C31) and Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 for OS X 10.5.2. (I use the download updaters including the (large) Mac OS X 10.5.2 Combo Updater.) If anyone finds these updates helps (or not) with any problems you've seen let me know. Thanks.
FYI: I've posted a page of initial Feedback on 10.5.2/Graphics Update that has 2008 Mac Pro owner reports in a separate section. (Unfortunately initial feedback from those with graphics/freeze problems, restart on wake, etc. said these updates did not help, although those w/o problems noted some benefits. (Page includes general reports, notes on an issue with Linotype FontExplorer X 1.2.2, benefits seen by a WoW user and a Lightwave 3D v9.3 user.)

NOTE: reports below were Before OS X 10.5.2 and Leopard Graphics Update for 10.5.2 were released. (Although based on feedback so far, the 10.5.2/Leopard graphics 1.0 update didn't help those that had graphics corruption/freezes, etc. previously.)

(added 2/11/2008)
" Hi Mike, Another quick update.
Basic System: New 2008) Mac Pro 8Core 2.8mhz with Default configuration.(320GB HD, 2GBRam...) Still waiting for 4 new 500GB Samsung SpinRite HDs and a copy of windows Vista to be installed via bootcamp.

Hardware:
Epson Perfection 4490 PHOTO:
After installing the Epson drivers I was not able to run their utility (it says it can't find the scanner). Photoshop does not allow me to scan from it. But the strange thing is that it seems to work just fine with the native Image capture Software. (Some others have noted that (and even using Preview for scanning) at the separate page here on Scanners w/OS X 10.5.x - Feedback, Tips/Tricks)

Epson stylus Photo R1800:
After installing the Epson Drivers it was quickly recognized by the system and seems to work fine as well with the Epson Printer utility.

Brother HL5250DN (network printer)
Easy through the network, noissues on this one.

Router D-Link 655:
Instant access... Great connection without any problems so far.

I was also able to connect the new macpro to my home windows network without any problems. After connectingto my windows machine via SMB, shared folders in vista were recognized by leopard without a problem. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that I was also able to not only read but write into them.

Software:
As an interesting note for Photoshop Lightroom users, I was able to access the windows catalogs that I had in vista from the leopard version of lightroom without any glitches. This allowed me to keep my photography database & collection in the same windows drive and and manage the whole thing through Leopard! I just wish there was a way to access my pictures via iphoto (so I can use the book printing feature) without having to import them into the new system (basically an import without moving like lightroom does)
The CS3 suit works great so far.

For Font Manager I highly recommend the freeware Lynotype FontExplorer X

Cisco VPN (Crashed the system, I might need a new alternative compatible with Leopard)

Once I clone the base drive into one of the new 500GB HDs that are on the way and install Vista I'll let you know if I encounter any other issues. -Angel"

(added 2/11/2008)
"Horrible experience... Mac Pro, Dual CPU (8-core) 3.0GHz, 500GB drive, 2GB RAM, ATI HD2600XT
Freezing and screen artifacting right out of the box within 5 minutes. Nothing extra plugged in -- not even a application opened. Figured it was a one-time anomaly but it continued twice randomly over a few days. Figured it was time to call Apple. Attached is a pic of it happening again AFTER I installed apps. (screenshot clip showing display artifacts/vertical dashed lines...)

Have dealt with AppleCare for a few weeks and I seemed to have gotten a tech fresh out of school. Bad customer service. Had to bump it up to the next level which she did not want to do. Once I got serious with her about her repeated mistakes on the phone (and not getting back to me) and wanting to talk to her supervisor, she started working for me. There is so much more but I don't want to get into it nor do you need to hear the drama.

They are going to replace my machine -- at least we are in the process of it happening. It got so bad that it would not even boot up. I wanted to upgrade to a better board (graphics card?) but they were telling me it has to be an even swap. We were still negotiating this point and they came through with the upgrade at my cost which is fine.

I've never had these many issues dealing with Apple and am so disappointed. I had to re-set up my old system which is barely cutting it for me. At least I can still do some work.-MMcK."

(added 2/10/2008)
"I recently got an Early 2008 Mac Pro (8 core 3GHz model), and have experienced no problems, even with the original system install on the 500GB stock WD Caviar startup disk. (I asked if his Mac Pro shipped with the (original) build 9B2117, or a later build. Build 9B2127 was shipped with a new 8800GT equipped Mac Pro.-Mike)
Yes, I also have the earlier build of OS X (9B2117), but I took delivery of this machine on January 25th.

The machine shipped with 4GB RAM, but I've just ordered 4GB more for a total of 8GB. I use Final Cut Studio and Adobe Creative Suite a lot, and I get a lot more disk thrashing with 4GB RAM on this machine than with the same amount of RAM on my old dual 2.3 GHz G5.

I'm happy to report that my PCIe SIIG FireWire card works as well in the Mac Pro as it did in the G5. I had a lot of problems initially with the SIIG card in the G5, until SIIG finally agreed to swap cards. But the replacement has been working for a couple of years in the G5, and now works well in the Intel Mac, where I use it to input and output audio and video.
Here's my best Cinebench. -Steve"
CINEBENCH R10
****************************************************
Processor: 2 x Xeon 5400
MHz: 3000 (3 GHz)
Number of CPUs: 8
Operating System : OS X 32 BIT 10.5.1 (9B2117)
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO OpenGL Engine
Resolution: 1920 x 1200, 32 Bit (Millions)
****************************************************
Rendering (Single CPU): 3402 CB-CPU
Rendering (Multiple CPU): 19550 CB-CPU
Multiprocessor Speedup: 5.75

Shading (OpenGL Standard) : 6391 CB-GFX
****************************************************

(added 2/10/2008)
"I switched from a PC to a 2.88GHz MacPro 320GB and 500GB HD, ATI HD2600XT, 2GB RAM, the rest stock.
Recieved it on Feb 6th 3pm
5pm - Fan sou