Pros & Cons
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- Microsoft Windows- and Mac OS X-compatible (with Boot Camp).
- Quad-core performance.
- Approaches Native PPC performance, even with older apps.
- Ordering system simplified.
- PCIe slots galore support multiple monitors with extra graphics cards.
- Easy to service and upgrade.
- Quieter than the old Power Macs.
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- Windows support isn't quite there yet (still beta).
- Stratospheric pricing as configured.
- ECC DDR2 memory is expensive.
Apple Mac Pro (Intel Conroe chipset) Specs
| Graphics Processor | Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 |
| Operating System | Mac OS X 10.4 |
| Optical Drive | Dual-Layer DVD+/-RW |
| Processor | Intel Xeon 5160 |
| Processor Speed | 3 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 4 |
| Screen Size | 23 |
Apple's new Mac Pro ($7,578 direct, $8,577 with a 23-inch widescreen LCD monitor), the latest professional Macintosh desktop to emerge from the company's Cupertino, California, stables, sure is a workhorse. All Mac Pros are now "quad core," with two dual-core Xeon processors that are capable of holding up to 16GB of DDR2 ECC SDRAM, and 2 terabytes of hard drive space. The Mac Pro starts out at $2,499 for a modestly configured system, but we thought it would be fun to run a totally tricked-out workstation—so we tested a system that pushes the $8,000 price point. The verdict? For the Mac professional, the extra expense is worth the pure, unadulterated power.
Apple simplified the buying process: All Mac Pros start with the base $2,499 configuration, then it's up to you or your buying manager to customize the system for your business. It's a strategy that makes sense for the myriad businesses that professional Macs are used in: A digital video house won't necessarily get the same configuration as a university buying systems for its physics professors. This is in contrast to the iMac line, which has four "standard" configurations at four price points.
The Apple Power Mac G5, in its dual and quad-core variants, is the workhorse of the Mac-using community. The iMac is the sexy consumer model, but the pros who work on multimillion-dollar contracts use these aluminum towers to meet their deadlines. When I reviewed the
The Mac Pro looks just like the Power Mac it replaces, except for a few small differences. There's an extra optical bay (unoccupied in our test system), an extra USB 2.0 port, and a new FireWire 800 port on the front panel. The setup inside the tower is similar, yet vastly different. The old large G5 ducts are gone; now, there are riser cards for the DDR2 ECC memory. You can install up to eight DIMMs for a total of 16GB. (Once larger DIMMS become available, the memory capacity could go up). DDR2-667 ECC memory is a little expensive—about $1,000 for a 4GB kit (you need to install pairs of DIMMs)—even from third-party vendors such as Crucial. There's a smidge more room for the PCIe card slots, including a dedicated double-wide slot for the graphics card and a staggering four PCIe slots, handy for multiple graphics cards driving multiple monitors. Four slide-out drive trays can accommodate four SATA drives with 3-Gbps throughput, and the trays are designed so that you can add a drive to the tray and install it without having to manually connect the drive power and data cables; the connectors are built into the drive bays. It's almost as if the drives are mounted like cartridges—a plus if you have to swap data drives out fast, like when digital video editors need to rush a project down to the broadcast booth now.
Power Mac users should be able to start working on the new Mac Pros without changing any routines. When you're working, though, you might notice something missing: fan noise. The Mac Pro (even the high-powered 3.0-GHz model) is a lot quieter than the older Power Mac G5. When I ran CPU-intensive tests such as CineBench in the past, the G5s would heat up and the cooling fans would jump into loud-and-fast mode. The Mac Pro's fans don't spool up to quite so obnoxious levels, which makes the system better for both quiet environments and your sanity in general. The lower noise is a result of the cooler-running Xeon processors.
The tests I ran confirm that the Mac Pro is a powerhouse. In the 10-stage Photoshop CS2 test, it edged out the 2.7-GHz Power Mac G5 dual CPU (1 minute 12 seconds for the Mac Pro vs. 1:14 for the G5 dual) and came in just slower than the Quad G5's 0:57. This means you still pay a price for running an older, non-Universal app in Apple's Rosetta "translation environment," but since the Mac Pro is so powerful, that cost is relatively minor.
The Mac Pro also prepares you for the next generation of applications, which will be PowerPC- and Intel-optimized. While the Quad G5 scored a playable 61 frames per second on Doom 3 in Mac OS X, the new Mac Pro scores a smooth 133 fps—using the same 512MB nVidia Quadro FX 4500 graphics card. What does all this mean? Well, if you stick with the Mac OS X operating system, you should be able to continue using your old apps, yet at a performance level that's similar to or better than you've experienced before. The Mac Pro's CineBench scores were through the roof, at 1,567 in Mac OS X and 1,463 in Microsoft Windows XP. Not surprisingly, these are the highest scores I've seen yet. The
Test Results
I couldn't resist installing Boot Camp Beta 1.1 and running Windows XP Pro to see how the Mac Pro would fare. Signs are good so far, with just one glitch that proves Boot Camp is still beta software. Running the Mac Pro with Windows XP was simple, since the wizard-based setup is so easy to follow. Since Apple sent us four SATA drives, I used one as a dedicated 500GB Windows XP volume. Running 3D benchmark tests in Windows was a breeze, and the Mac Pro proved itself a worthy competitor. With its Quadro FX 4500 graphics card (which is more of a professional workstation card than a gamers' card), the Mac Pro played both Doom 3 and Splinter Cell Chaos Theory well at lower resolution (1,024-by-768). It also did all right at the medium graphics levels (such as High Quality for Doom 3 and 1,600-by-1,200 for Splinter Cell). At the most strenuous levels, 1,600-by-1,200 Ultra quality on Doom 3 and 2,560-by-1,600 for Splinter Cell, the Mac Pro started to stutter, understandable in a single-graphics-card system.
The one glitch that reared its ugly head during testing was a slow-performance bug in the hard drive subsystem: When running Windows XP under Boot Camp, disk access and transfer is pretty slow, and tasks that take seconds on a regular PC or Mac (such as copying a file) can take minutes. The drive glitch happens in Boot Camp on the Mac Pro, but not on iMacs and Mac minis. This contributed to the Mac Pro's good but disappointing score on SYSmark 2004 SE. After seeing its other test results, I expected the Mac Pro to score at least 200 points higher. Apple has acknowledged this disk-performance bug, and the problem should be fixed in time for Boot Camp's integration into Mac OS 10.5 next year. If you're not interested in Boot Camp, fear not: Disk access while running Mac OS X 10.4 is as snappy as you'd expect.
The Mac Pro is a capable video transcoder in Windows XP under Boot Camp: Its Windows Media Encoder score of 4:42 using our standard video test file falls just behind our class leaders, the Falcon NW Mach V (Core 2 Extreme) (4:08) and the
If you're a professional user who needs to switch projects back and forth between Mac OS X and Windows XP, you might still want to use two different workstations (as opposed to the business user, who should be fine with a MacBook or iMac). But if you're buying professional Macs for a Mac OS X-only business, grab your buying manager, sprint to store.apple.com, and start upgrading your power users to the Intel-powered Mac Pro. It's that good.
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Benchmark Test Results
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