Mac Pro + LED Cinema Display First Impressions

Combining the fact I needed a 21st birthday present with a big chunk of cash I've been saving for the best part of the last 2 years for a new computer, I am lucky enough to be the proud owner of an 8 core Mac Pro and 2 LED Cinema Displays. This system should certainly help the 2k compositing I've been doing on my iMac until now! I opted for a dual quad core 2.26 GHz machine with 8GB of RAM and 2 NVidia cards in order to power the LED Cinema displays, in short its my dream setup and I am incredibly pleased with it.

However, there are a few little niggles involved with using the LED displays with a mac pro that I have not read about anywhere other than the Apple support forums, so I'll talk about them briefly here.

1) The cables provided on the LED display are incredibly short (of course it was originally designed for the macbooks but Apple now market it as a display compatible with all of their systems). This is slightly annoying when using dual displays as I can't have them quite as far away from the machine as I would like; I can imagine for anyone wanting the screens further away from the mac pro than simply above it on the desk this could be a major problem. I have however ordered 2 3 foot mini-displayport extension cables from www.monoprice.com at a reasonable $6 each. According to posts on the Apple support forums these work a treat, so thats problem 1 solved!

2) The second annoyance is more of an observation, as it doesn't actually bother me, but I know it would again be very annoying and inconvenient for some - Screen brightness. The f1 and f2 keys control screen brightness on all macs for the last few years, and the mac pro and LED Cinema display setup is no different. However, upon trying the keys I found that they only control the brightness of the screen plugged into the first graphics card. No biggie, I just went to the display preference pane, which displays a seperate brightness slider for each screen. Puzzlingly though, both sliders still only control the 1 display - combined with the lack of physical brightness buttons on the displays this seems to make it impossible to adjust the brightness of display number 2. Personally I like my displays on full brightness, but I know some find this too bright.

My guess is that this is a software issue which will be resolved with the next Leopard update, or in Snow Leopard when it is released. Still a slight oversight on Apple's part here though which could frustrate some users who have opted to buy a fully-specced workstation and gorgeous LED displays!

Aside from these two small issues the machine and displays look and perform beautifully, and I couldn't be happier with them. I'll be getting back to the nitty gritty compositing work on the Dark Side of The Earth again now, so expect an update on that soon. (Also, Neil has just posted a new podcast about the fight choreography over on the official site - go check it out!)