Apple Mac Pro (eight-core, 2009 edition) review

As with the expansion-card rod, this removable tray will really only benefit those who will make frequent upgrades or repairs to the Mac Pro. But we can't fault Apple for flexing its design muscle and providing its customers with the sense that the Mac Pro is as much a unique design object as a productivity tool. With Windows PC makers largely reliant on industry standards for motherboards and other components, few, if any, of Apple's competitors are as well-positioned to make such dramatic innovations to their own desktops.

Features
Apple has updated the Mac Pro's CPU, memory and graphics card. As with the older Mac Pro, the new model comes in either single-chip quad-core or dual-chip eight-core configurations, but Apple has now upgraded to Intel's Xeon 5500 chips, based on the Nehalem core shared by Intel's Core i7 consumer desktop chips.

With Nehalem come a few technology upgrades, specifically support for DDR3 memory and the return of Hyper-Threading Technology from the days of Intel's Pentium 4 chips. Hyper-Threading Technology can simulate more processing threads on the CPU, for up to 16 threads in total on our eight-core Mac Pro.

Aside from the processor and memory, Apple has also added a 512MB Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics card to the new Mac Pro's baseline spec, which amounts to a faster GPU and twice the graphics memory as the older ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT default card. You also get a 640GB hard drive this time around -- double the previous model's standard option.

Performance
Before we get into our performance tests, we should point out that our primary comparison for our eight-core default spec Mac Pro is the eight-core model from the previous generation. Because the new model's triple-channel memory needs to work in groups of three to take advantage of its full 1,066MHz bandwidth, we kept our review unit with its default 6GB of DDR3 RAM.

The older model, on the other hand, uses dual-channel DDR2 memory, and so it works fastest in multiples of two. Thus, we tested the older system with 4GB and 8GB to account for both higher and lower memory allotments in relation to the new 6GB system. Interestingly, we saw little difference between our 4GB and 8GB test results, but, since we have the scores, we might as well share what we found.

Firstly, it's important to note that the new CPUs' core 2.26GHz clock speed is significantly slower than the pair of 2.8GHz chips in the older model. This does not mean that the new Mac Pro is slow across the board, because it still has faster memory and a whole new CPU architecture with a more efficient cache structure.