What is your experience with Vista64 on a Mac Pro?

I am about to upgrade my main machine. I usually do this on about an 18 month basis (about the same as photoshop) but I am hoping this one will last three years.

I was all ready to get a few PC parts (motherboads cpu memory a couple of SSDs and a second video card) but then the currency fluctuations hit big time and CPU prices in Canada went mad. They doubled the price for Xeons.

So the PC I was going to get was based on an ASUS Z7S WS board, two Xeon 2.83's and 16 GB FBDIMMS (I use 8GB right now and it is about half of what I need as my two iRAM swap drives still overflow on a regular basis). With the currency fluctuations I had to step down the CPUs to 2.66 and they still cost more that the 2.83 did a couple on months ago. If I can get 2.66 OEM chips which have no Intel warrenty these will be a good price.

Now Apple has not changed their Mac prices so the Mac Pro is a very good price. I will have to give up RAID as Apple says their hardware will not work in windows. Unless.....

a simple SiliconImage card will still work under Vista64 on a Mac. So to those who have used Vista64 on the Mac what is your experience with slot based hardware that is supported in windows but not in OSX? For example would a second Windows only video card work OK? Would I be able to put in a PCIe slot based RAID card (a cheap SiliconImage based software RAID card is what I would likely use) and install windows OS on that? Do I get that sort of support with the EFI-BIOS transition that bootcamp offers?


I do have to spend a bit more on the Mac as I will not get to use some of my wintel machine parts but the final price is fairly close. The windows based machine would have a couple of nice extras like two SSDs in RAID0 to boot from but the Mac has faster CPUs for money right now.

What do you need dual Xeon's and 16GB RAM for? Because you certainly don't for Photoshop.

And why in the world would you want to run Vista on a Mac?

OdiN1701 wrote in post #6745458
What do you need dual Xeon's and 16GB RAM for? Because you certainly don't for Photoshop.

And why in the world would you want to run Vista on a Mac?

I dissagree on the Dual Xeons and 16gb ram, because that is close to my setup and it is hard for me to use anything else now.

As for 64 bit on the Mac, their drivers are horrid on either 32 or 64 bit Vista. I advise to steer clear of the Mac if you want to run Vista.

incendy wrote in post #6746479
I dissagree on the Dual Xeons and 16gb ram, because that is close to my setup and it is hard for me to use anything else now.

As for 64 bit on the Mac, their drivers are horrid on either 32 or 64 bit Vista. I advise to steer clear of the Mac if you want to run Vista.

Thanks for the feedback.

I know lots of Mac users but none with either Mac Pro experience or using Vista extensively. I really don't want to regret the purchase. By horrid do you mean Apple can't write proper drivers (instability etc) or do you mean the support is very shallow (ie limited hardware)? Have you tried to use Vista64 on a Mac Pro and been foiled?

Apple claims Vista64 support but none for RAID. Lack of inexpensive RAID is a large drawback as I do not like waiting so long for a file save that I can make a cup of coffee while I wait sort of thing (I need to cut back on the coffee). Caldigit makes one but it is a high end solution that I don't want to buy at this time.

I would go Mac OS if it supported the software I use so Vista it is. I guess I could go wintel and overclock a bit to make up the performance difference. The ASUS board is supposed to overclock very well.

incendy wrote in post #6746479
As for 64 bit on the Mac, their drivers are horrid on either 32 or 64 bit Vista. I advise to steer clear of the Mac if you want to run Vista.

They can't be too horrid. After all, at one time the fastest Vista notebook was a MacBook Pro according to PC World. I occasionally boot my MBP into XP and it runs just fine.

So it looks like the actual experience in using Vista on a Mac tower is very low so I guess that alone says it is not somehting many actually do bother with (I know laptops/iMacs are different but the hardware there is so fixed that there would be no big challenges as long as the basic drivers exist) and that alone is a bit of a warnng that I should not venture into those waters. You know what they say about pioneers?

I am thinking that the total "computer experience" is going to be smoother for me on a wintel PC since I can get more choice in hardware on the PC side. Harddrives seem to be the big bottle neck to me in how smooth a machine works and SSD drives in RAID0 and such will make the machine seem faster than a slightly high CPU and FSB speed.

Anyone want to tell me (from actual experience please) that this is not so. Still Mac being the cheaper hardware right now is a bit of an anomoly it seems if all the talk about Macs costing more is to be believed (I don't necessarily buy that since hardware is always a bit tricky to compare).

I think you ought to ask these questions at the Apple forums on Apple's support pages. I'm sure you'd get the answers you're looking for. I just run 32 bit XP on mine.