What about Mac Pro Quad Core upgrade by yourself? [Archive]

Sanjin Jukic

01-11-2007, 01:08 AM

What about Quad Core upgrade by yourself?

"...you could theoretically drop two Clovertown
processors in there and you'd have an 8-core Mac Pro...

...We grabbed a pair of 2.4GHz Clovertown samples and
tossed them in the system, and to our pleasure, they
worked just fine. Our samples used a 1066MHz FSB,
although we're expecting the final chip to use a
1333MHz FSB, but the most important part of the test
is that all 8 cores were detected and functional..."

More at

http://anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2832&p=6

Jeff Kilgroe

01-11-2007, 11:49 AM

It's been hashed over a lot on some of the Mac discussion forums and I've even seen a blog (sorry don't have the link right now) where two guys did it with 2.33GHz Clovertowns (about 2 to 3 weeks ago) and took pictures.

The conclusion: Poor value for the money since you're already replacing two perfectly good CPUs. It voids your warranty since you have to break two tabs (which serve no purpose other than tamper detection).

And there's the universal law that as soon as I do it, Apple will start shipping the 8-core models. But looking at current CPU resale value on eBay and elsewhere combined with the price of the quad-core Clovertown and current Mac Pro prices... It doesn't add up. The vast majority of software out there won't benefit from 8 cores, in fact very little software can even use 4 cores efficeintly. Operations like rendering and/or video encoding can be just as effective and sometimes more so by splitting it up to multiple systems in addition to CPUs. Factor all that stuff together and in most situations, it makes more sense to buy 2 Mac Pro systems instead of trying to bump one to 8-cores on your own.

But go for it if you'd like. :) Because it does work just fine... Which is why I'm surprised that Apple isn't shipping a quad-core option. Everyone else is... My guess is Apple is waiting for the upcoming Stoakley chipset from Intel which should start shipping to OEMs late next month, which means mainboards and systems based on it will be out in April. So I think we'll see the 8-core Mac Pro along with updated Pro apps at NAB.