The XW8400 and Mac Pro 1,1 are nearly identical systems, as far as both are based on the Intel Xeon 53XX reference board. They use the same CPUs, the same RAM, the same bridge chips. The primary difference is the Apple ROM on the Mac Pro board vs PC BIOS on the XW8400. Oh, and the XW8400 / XW8600 have integrated SAS / RAID controller. I had OS X running on the XW8400 at one point, and it was painful because of that RAID. The disk controller ran all kinds of hell on the .kext system in OS X. If I remember correctly, I may have even needed a third-party SATA controller to get the boot volume up so it could load the .kext to even address the RAID. Been a few years.
The funny thing is, my wife has a Mac Pro 5,1 mid 2010 (if memory is serving) and the XW8400 re-encodes video nearly 3x faster. Though hers doesn't have the dual quad ... believe hers is a single quad Nehalem? Not home so can't pull up System Information. On the reverse side, I do have to say this: I got a 5TB drive from my parents as a Christmas gift, the XW8400 BIOS can't reference past about 2.5. So my drive is in the wife's Mac and I'm going to pull her 2TB to drop in on top of the 6TB (3x 2TB) to fill the four drive bays and reimage with FreeNAS and ZFS. I was very disappointed with that. I *suppose* I could put that third-party controller back in there. Eh, whatever. EdB. On Fri, May 6, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Curt Raymond via Mercedes < mercedes@okiebenz.com> wrote: > Same era. I ran demos on an XW8400 at NAB in 2007. > -Curt > > From: Jim Cathey <jim.cathey...@gmail.com> > To: Mercedes Discussion List <mercedes@okiebenz.com> > Cc: Curt Raymond <curtlud...@yahoo.com>; Ed Booher <edboo...@gmail.com> > Sent: Friday, May 6, 2016 11:51 AM > Subject: Re: [MBZ] OT - built a PC from scratch recently? > > > This is like the system I call "The Beast", a XW8400. Dual quad-core > > Xeon, > > 16 GB RAM, and the *case* my Lord that thing is massive. > > Sounds like this 2007 Mac Pro. > > -- Jim > > > > > _______________________________________ > http://www.okiebenz.com > > To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ > > To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: > http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com > > -- "Das beste oder nichts." - *Gottlieb Daimler* _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
