MacPro into an UGM

[empowered]

I was planing on building a $4000 gaming rig in the near future. But I came across the MacPro...and well...I think I may use that as the base for everything. Just one question, I've never used a Mac before. I'm slowly learning, but was wondering how I could make the MacPro into a quad-sli gaming rig, running Vista Ultimate. Should I dual boot it or run it with VM? Any help would be most welcome. I'd just like to know if what I was thinking is feasible compared to actually building one from scratch.

Thank you
JM

No, you can't run a Crap Pro as a gaming rig.

You can attach a gaming card in the Pro which will work solely under Boot-Camped Windows, but it requires a power kludge that kind of negates the whole point of the innards of the machine. You can also play with flashing an 8800GTS with EFI compliant firmware but all of these are just ultimately pointless kludges.

The hardware is also very quiet, but the penalty there is just silly cooling. And because of the way the fans are, if you actually start to try spool up the fans to move as much air as some ready-built gaming rigs do (without too much noise) the Crap Pro ends up noisier.

If you want something ready built which you want to use as an upgradeable, serious gaming rig as well as for general purpose computing, I'd say the Blackbird is your go-to choice with the XPS 730 H2C as a possible choice too. The octocore Xeon Macs are great machines for ripping through your iPod video transcodes for example but it is not a gaming machine, although you'll see plenty of people who don't know better trying to turn it into one on Apple-related forums.

If you definitely want to go Octocore, I'd suggest stepping up the budget just a tad and building a Skulltrail system. Personally I'd been wanting a Blackbird for the longest time, but they've never been available in my neck of the woods - so recently I went the Skulltrail way. It'll do Quad SLI and also Crossfire too, so you're set either way. I use my octocore Crap Pros with a mix of FX5600 and 8800GT's solely as Macs - not even for Windows and certainly not for gaming.

[empowered]

Well see my dream rig was going to be:

1000W PSU
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 3GHz
EVGA NForce 790i Ultimate
Corsair 2GB DDR2-800 x 4
RaptorX HDD
Creative Labs X-Fi Xtremegamer
Gforce 9800 GX2 x 2

So, what you are saying is that for possibly a base, I could go for the Skulltrial or Blackbird and then upgrading when needed. Interesting. I'll have to look into that. Never heard of Skulltrial before. Thank you. Any other interesting info I should know?

The Skulltrail is a dual-Xeon setup rather like the Pro, but supporting the Xeon-socketed Core Quad Extreme processors, SLI and Crossfire. The scope of the system as a gaming and power workstation is way beyond the Pro. However currently only a limited number of boutique builders (and none of the majors) offer ready-built machines, and at a large price premium for the top-end specs. You can however build your own where you have more leeway to do whatever you like.

The Intel motherboard is the BOXD5400XS. Google that and you'll see plenty.

If that's too rich for your blood and if gaming is the first thing on the list, the system specs you mentioned will also be more effective than a Pro - especially if you start winding up that CPU. And you can of course throw it together for a reasonable price... yet although if you're a competent builder it's possible to have a very neat looking rig, there's always something to be said for a really nicely built ready-built machine like the Blackbird (and I have to give some kudos to the Pro in this area here too because it is very neat inside - even if the drive bays suck) or even if it's not as pretty inside, just being able to go to one place if you have problems like the Dell XPS.

[empowered]

Ah, found it. That looks great. Have to read if it can hold 8GB of RAM, but I'm sure it can. I think I'll save more money up then. Thank you. This really helps a lot