Apple’s updated 2010 Mac Pro line was a long time coming, but it certainly addressed would-be buyers’ key complaint: the choice of processors. Now offering everything from a single Intel Xeon through to a pair of six-core chips, the new Mac Pro range claims to be “the most powerful, most configurable Mac ever.” We’ve had a dual-processor quadcore Mac Pro on the SlashGear test bench for a couple of weeks; check out our full review after the cut.
Our review unit slots into the middle of the updated Mac Pro range, with two of Intel’s 2.4GHz quadcore Xeon E5620 CPUs, 6GB of 1066MHz DDR3 memory and an ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB video card. With a 1TB 7,200rpm hard-drive it comes in at $3,499 – for $1,000 less you can have a single 2.8GHz Xeon quadcore and half the memory, while for $1,500 more there’s the dual 2.66GHz hexacore Xeon flagship. Still no Blu-ray – not even the option – so it’s a standard 18x SuperDrive, four PCI Express 2.0 slots, five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports. Networking options include two-gigabit Ethernet ports, Bluetooth 2.1 and WiFi a/b/g/n.
There’s no shortage of graphics choices, either: the Radeon HD 5770 has Dual-Link DVI port and pair of Mini DisplayPort connectors. As for audio, there’s a digital optical input and output, plus analog in/out on the rear panel, and a headphone socket on the front (along with two each of the FireWire and USB ports). We’d love to see USB 3.0 or even eSATA there too, but sadly Apple hasn’t seen fit to install them in this particular Mac Pro generation.
Take off the side panel – an easy task with the flip-up (and lockable) latch on the back – and Apple’s unusual interior layout is revealed. Everything is sectioned off, with the processors and memory at the bottom in a pullout tray, the PCI Express 2.0 slots in the middle, and then the four 3.5-inch hard-drive bays slung above. Each bay has a drive carrier that a standard SATA 3Gb/s drive clips into, before slotting – cable free – into place. Our review unit had a single 1TB drive, but you can specify up to 8TB of traditional HDDs or up to four 512GB SSDs and an optional RAID controller for drive redundancy (RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 0+1 supported).
Slick design, a sensible layout and plenty of ports are no use at all if the core system doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain, and happily the 2010 Mac Pro is capable of some serious crunching. We performed some of our benchmark testing natively in OS X, and then other elements in Windows 7 Ultimate running in either Parallels or Boot Camp. It’s common for Mac Pro owners to spend at least part of their time in a dual-booting or multimode environment, depending on the software tools they’re reliant on, and so we felt this would give a more balanced view of the desktop than OS X figures alone.
We started out with Geekbench, a synthetic test of processor and memory performance. Tested natively in OS X 10.6.4 Snow Leopard (with the latest patches and updates installed), the Mac Pro scored 14,378. In comparison, a 2009 Mac Pro – with a single Xeon 2.66GHz processor but 12GB of DDR3 memory, a configuration costing roughly the same as the machine in today’s review – scored 9,600.
We then booted into Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit using Boot Camp, and the Mac Pro scored 11,451. Loading Windows in Parallels – which allows you to run both Mac and PC apps at the same time – saw a Windows 7 Geekbench score of 6,017, while scores using VMware ranged from 5563 to 6017. It should be noted that these virtualization scores were calculated when Parallels and VMware were running in four core mode; although they scored higher when using all eight cores, that leaves no resources for the host OS and isn’t advisable in real-world applications.
In contrast, Lenovo’s hefty ThinkStation C20 workstation, with its 8GB of DDR3 memory and dual 2.66GHz Xeon X5650 processors scored 19,565 in Windows 7 Professional. You pay considerably for those extra 5,000 points, however, considering the ThinkStation C20 is a $6,774 machine (almost double what Apple is asking for this Mac Pro).