Beastly Impressions

Many (2) of you have been asking me how I like The Beast, and if He is everything I had hoped he would be. The answer is, yes, and then some. I now own a supercomputer. I'm not sure anything I could do to this thing could really tax it. That's a good thing because I am going to challenge it with giant photos and complex filters and massive data manipulation. And maybe some moviemaking in the future.

As of yesterday, I have it about half setup for the Photography business. Lightroom and Photoshop are up and running, all pictures and user data is moved over, and Dot Mac has synced all my email, preferences, widgets, addresses, appointments, and dock items over from the MacBook. So it is beginning to feel like home. I told Heather it was a little sad moving all my data off her MacBook, almost like moving out. And now I have moved into a much bigger place with a really nice view.

So far, so good. I really needed to do this, editing and compositing large photos is hugely resource intensive and it was really challenging for the MacBook. The Beast just tears through that stuff like a bullet train through parchment paper. And the big cinema display shows every nuance of the photos all big and up-in-my-face.

My next steps are to calibrate the display so it shows perfect color, set up the pen tablet, move over all my Photoshop actions and Lightroom presets, and custom brushes, etc. Then I'll have no excuses left :)

If you're still with me, here are the specs for The Beast:

Apple "Early 2008 Model" Mac Pro
2 x 4-core Intel Xeon "Harpertown" 5400-series CPUs, clocked at 2.8 GHz per core, 8 cores total
12 MB Cache per CPU
Dual independent 1600 MHz front side busses, one per CPU
10 GB Fully-buffered 800 MHz RAM, 256 bit wide 4-way ported memory architecture
500 GB main HDU, SATA interface
2 x 160 GB SATA striped RAID drive array for Photoshop swap space
ATI Radeon graphics with 256 MB memory and support for up to two 30" ACDs
23" Apple Cinema HD Display, 1920x1200 resolution, DVI digital connection
Wacom Intuos3 6x11 tablet
X-Rite Eye-1 display calibrator/profiler
Apple Mighty Mouse, Bluetooth version

Mac OS X 10.5.2 "Leopard"
Adobe Photoshop CS3 10.0.1
Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1

Plus a constellation of external Firewire drives for data and backups