“In front of me, two 30-in. Apple Cinema Displays glow softly at my desk. Beside me sits the fastest stock-configuration Macintosh that Apple Inc. has ever shipped: a superfast eight-core Mac Pro. Inside the Mac — and on full display on those screens — is Mac OS X 10.5, better known as Leopard, Apple’s latest operating system. All around me is the work I’ve been putting off that is now getting done…One thing is certain: This Mac Pro packs a mighty punch in raw bandwidth and horsepower.,” Michael DeAgonia reports for Compuetrworld.
“Inside all of the new Mac Pro machines are Intel Xeon 5400-series processors, code-named Harpertown. My review unit is the eight-core 2.8-GHz model, stacked with 4GB of memory — double the standard configuration. Each quad-core processor sports 12MB of Level 2 cache memory, so this particular Mac Pro has 24MB. The main logic board architecture also received an upgrade — it now sports high-bandwidth, dual independent 1,600-MHz front-side buses, allowing you to use up to 32GB of 800-MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memory,” DeAgonia reports.
“The graphics card is nothing to sneeze at: an ATI Radeon HD 2600 with 256MB of GDDR3 dedicated video RAM capable of pushing enough power for two 2560-by-1600-pixel, 30-in. Cinema Displays. The $1,799 displays themselves are gorgeous, displaying deep blacks and vibrant hues at a resolution sharp enough to show off Mac OS X Leopard’s amazingly detailed and fluid graphics while rendering even small text clearly,” DeAgonia reports.
“Given the plethora of build-to-order options Apple now offers, there’s a Mac Pro for just about any task. This is an amazing machine that is as fast as it is stable, offering pure brute force and processing power at a competitive price for what you get,” DeAgonia reports.
Full review here.
