“We might be ahead of Apple’s product release cycle, and we’ve probably violated our Mac Pro’s warranty, but we just had to see what the Apple Mac Pro could do when populated with a pair of Intel’s brand-new quad-core Xeon 5355 processors,” Daniel A. Begun reports for CNET.
Begun reports, “The quad-core processor era was ushered in with the release of quad-core processors for enthusiasts (the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700) and for servers and workstations (the Intel Xeon 5355) — and Intel was kind enough to supply us with a pair of 2.66GHz Xeon 5355 processors. As the Xeon 5355 is pin-compatible with the Xeon 5160 processors that came installed in our Mac Pro, we proceeded to swap out the two dual-core processors with the new quad-core processors. Incidentally, we strongly advise you not to try this at home: the Mac Pro case is not designed to allow the end user to perform CPU surgery — and we’ve got the cuts and bruises to prove it! With the pair of Xeon 5355 processors installed, we booted the system back up and were greeted with eight active processing cores in both Mac OS X and Windows XP via the Boot Camp Public Beta. With the transplant successful, it was time to run our benchmarks.”
Full article here.
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