Apple's New Mac Pro Blows Away The Competition
Nov. 16, 2006 By Richard Hoffman - Courtesy of InformationWeek
A
fter
two weeks with one of the new Mac Pro desktops, I've
got only one word: "Wow. The new Apple Mac Pro
desktop is one of the best-designed,
highly-performing desktops currently available at any
price. Not only does it run Mac OS X and OS X
applications at absolutely blazing speeds, but if you
install Parallels Desktop for Mac (or Apple's Boot
Camp), the Mac Pro makes a better Windows workstation
than almost any other Windows desktop out there.
The attention to detail, as well as substantial
improvement over the previous Power Mac G5, is
obvious. Below the front-mounted power button and
light are a complete set of I/O ports: two USB 2.0
ports, one FireWire 400, one FireWire 800, and a
headphone jack. This full set of front ports saves a
great deal of time crawling around the back of the
device. Two front panels allow the inclusion of dual
optical drives, another key improvement.
On the back, three more USB 2.0 ports and an
additional pair of FireWire ports (one 400, the other
800) are joined by S/PDIF optical digital audio
in/out, and 1/8-inch line in/out ports. Two Ethernet
ports can be used separately, but the Mac Pro also
supports link aggregation and VLAN 802.1q tags (VLAN
tags are used to allow 802.1q tunnelling and
routing), allowing for a wide range of networking and
networked storage options.
The case design is very similar to that of the
previous Mac tower on the outside, but the
differences inside are impressive. A single lever on
the rear of the case allows the side panel to rotate
up simply and quickly, giving easy access to up to
four direct-attach internal drives, which slide into
the side of the frame securely with almost no effort.
A double-wide PCI Express slot for the graphics card
keeps the other three full-size PCI Express slots
free for other uses, and the system RAM is easily
accessible via a pair of easily-removed riser cards.
The test machine came configured with top-of-the-line
dual 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors (the base
configuration has a pair of 2.66 Ghz CPUs), 4 GB of
667 Mhz FB-DIMM RAM (expandable up to 16GB), and four
500GB SATA drives (maxing out the four drive bays),
for a total of 2 Terabytes. The ATI Radeon X1900 XT
graphics card that came with our Mac Pro is a solid
performer. It's not quite as fast as the NVIDIA
Quadro FX 4500, which has the advantage of also being
able to drive the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD display,
but reasonably-priced and much more capable than the
stock NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT. (The two Nvidia cards
are the other two options for the Mac Pro.)
Putting It To The Test_In testing the Mac Pro, I ran
through a series of real-world tests and tasks,
including digital video, audio, graphics, and DVD
authoring products from Apple and Adobe, Microsoft
office automation programs (Word, Excel, PowerPoint),
and both cross-platform and single-platform
benchmarks, such as Cinebench and XBench. Where
possible, I initiated tests under both OS X and
Windows XP SP2 using both the latest build of
Parallels Desktop for Mac (Build 1970) and Apple's
latest Boot Camp Beta (1.1.1). I also ran most tests,
where possible, against my baseline reference
platform, a 1Ghz G4 Powerbook with 1GB of RAM,
upgraded with a Momentus 5400.2 120GB hard drive and
a Pioneer DVR-K04L optical drive.
Raw power is what the Mac Pro is all about. Overall
XBench numbers were roughly five times higher on the
Mac Pro than the Powerbook reference platform (170.64
versus 35.70); that scale of differential is not
unexpected, given the Mac Pro's two dual-core 3 Ghz
processors, each with its own independent 1.33 Ghz
frontside bus, ATI Radeon X1900 XT card loaded with
512MB of GDDR3 SSDRAM, 4 GB of fast system RAM, and
up to four Serial ATA drives, each with its own 3Gb/s
channel. Cinebench 9.5 figures were similarly
impressive, many multiples above the reference
platform.
In ripping and encoding audio data from a CD, the Mac
Pro did only moderately better, at 3 minutes 55
seconds, than the Powerbook reference machine (4
minutes 35 seconds), but this anomalous result can
likely be explained by a bottleneck created by the
32x CD read speed of the drives in both the Powerbook
and the Mac Pro. More telling was the CPU-intensive
task of re-encoding existing MP3 audio files to AAC,
where the Mac Pro screamed along at roughly five
times the speed of the reference platform, doing what
the Powerbook took 6 minutes 17 seconds to do in a
mere 1 minute, 5 seconds.
The office automation tasks again proved the worth of
the Mac Pro. One test task, using Microsoft Word to
load and scroll through a copy of Tolstoy's War And
Peace, took 48 seconds to load and 1 minute 59
seconds to scroll on the Mac Pro, versus 1 minute 27
seconds and 2 minute 47 seconds on the reference
platform. The same tasks under Windows using
Parallels Workstation were, at 31 seconds and 1
minute 44 seconds, even faster, indicating likely
performance gains when mainstays like the Microsoft
Office suite are available in universal versions.
Slight Hit For Adobe_But while Apple's mix of
Universal binary professional digital audio, video,
graphics and authoring applications (Logic Pro,
Soundtrack Pro, Final Cut Pro, and Aperture) run at
warp speed on the Mac Pro, the many professionals now
using Adobe software will have to make do with
running under Rosetta until Adobe releases Universal
binary versions of their products next spring.
That said, while tests of Adobe's currently-shipping
product versions reveal a significant performance hit
for Rosetta, results certainly fall well within the
usable range. For example, a series of Photoshop
filters that processed in 11.5 seconds on the
reference platform took half the time on the Mac Pro
(6 seconds), while a second set took 5.5 seconds on
the Mac Pro versus 15 seconds on the Powerbook. Much
greater speeds can be expected when the Universal
versions of the Adobe products appear, as suggested
by the near-doubling of speeds (as compared to
Rosetta) when using the Windows version of Photoshop
to run the same tests natively on the Mac Pro via
Apple's Boot Camp (3.3 seconds and 3 seconds,
respectively).
My experience with using Boot Camp and the Mac Pro,
along with the configuration of ATI Radeon X1900
graphics card and 23-inch Cinema Display, was the one
major fly in the ointment. Due to apparent driver
issues, installing Windows XP SP2 and using it proved
to be a huge problem. Boot Camp is still beta
software, and Apple has been releasing updates with
some frequency -- but the new 1.1.2 version, released
just as this review went to press, unfortunately does
not seem to fix the issues I experienced.
One of the major drawbacks for this stellar desktop
is price. Costs can accumulate quickly, especially
when adding options and the very expensive FB-DIMM
RAM. As a high-end workstation, the Mac Pro is very
hard to beat, almost in a class of its own, but those
looking for inexpensive generic employee workstations
would best look elsewhere.
In addition, hardware RAID would be preferable to the
software-based RAID options in the Mac Pro, though
the familiar and easy-to-use software RAID setup
allows for the usual range of mirrored and striped
arrays, and is made much more flexible and has much
greater capacity, due to the four internal drive
bays.
The Mac Pro, however you look at it, is a very
powerful, capable, expandable performer. Its dual OS
X/Windows capability and adoption of a range of
critical open standards make it worth consideration
in any enterprise looking for the best possible
machine for high-end use.