Product Reviews

The addition of an eight-core option to Apple's Mac Pro configuration options was perhaps the least surprising product announcement the company has made in recent years. No matter how much Apple might like to cloak its products in secrecy until it's ready to go public, the fact that Intel had launched a quad-core version of the Xeon several weeks earlier meant Apple's launch was inevitable.

Apple's apparent tardiness in making the quad-core chip, codenamed Clovertown, available in the Mac Pro attracted criticism in some quarters and prompted much glee among the more geeky in the Windows-using fraternity. After all, some PC manufacturers had launched eight-core machines more than a month earlier.

If you're the kind of person who cares about having the fastest personal computer in town under your desk, then the eight-core Mac Pro is a no-brainer. For the rest of us, however, it's a substantial investment, representing an £1100 premium on the previous top-of-the-range, quad-core Mac Pro, £2659 is a huge sum for any computer, even a top-end Mac.

So what do you get for your two-and-a-half grand? Well, for starters, two 3GHz quad-core Clovertown processors with a total of 16MB of Level 2 cache - 8MB per processor, 4MB shared between each pair of cores - 1GB of Ram, one 250GB 7200rpm Sata hard drive and a 16x SuperDrive. There's also a free 5.25in drive bay that you can use for an additional optical drive, such as a Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive when these become widely available and properly supported in Mac OS X. You'll almost certainly want to upgrade both the Ram and the hard drive, as there's no point having all that grunt and so little Ram and storage space. Budget for an extra £189 for an additional 1GB Ram if you buy it from Apple and £79 to double the hard drive capacity to 500GB.

The graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of Ram. The two Gigabit Ethernet ports are the only networking options so if you want to hook up wirelessly,

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you'll need to specify either AirPort Extreme or Bluetooth as a custom option. The other connection interface ports are two FireWire 800, two FireWire 400, five USB 2, optical digital audio input and output Toslink, line-level input and output, and two USB 1.1 sockets on the keyboard.

The maximum Ram is 16GB in eight slots, and each of the four hard drive bays support drives up to 750GB, making a maximum capacity of 3TB. The three empty bays include drive carriers, so installing internal drives at a later date is easy.

There are three open full-length PCI Express slots that support 16-lane cards. If superfast storage is a necessity, the Mac Pro can be configured with a dual- or quad-channel 4GB fibre-channel card. And if you need multiple monitors, you can add up to seven additional displays by installing four Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT cards.

None of the serious upgrades come cheap. However, this isn't the kind of machine you're going to use for occasional Photoshop work or the odd QuarkXPress layout. It will be a serious workhouse and the investment in even the basic spec means it makes sense to configure it in the way that will allow you to get the most out of it. In other words, the £2500 initial purchase price is likely to be just the beginning.

With that in mind, you need to be certain the additional power will be worth the investment. After all, the only difference between this machine and the significantly cheaper standard Mac Pro configuration is the processor.

The unit we tested had one or two extras. It was configured with 4GB of Ram and an ATI Radeon X1900 graphics card, which further boosts the price to £3278. Its performance in our tests was decidedly mixed. It did brilliantly in the Photoshop test designed to mimic how a designer uses the application, completing it in half the time taken by a dual 3GHz quad-core Mac Pro. In the more processor-intensive Photoshop test, however, it lagged significantly behind that machine. It's worth noting that these tests were carried out in Creative Suite 2 and, therefore, under Rosetta emulation, which will have had an effect on both sets of results. Making use of all eight cores in Cinebench turned in an impressive score, but Raw benchmarks from Xbench suggested more modest performance.

This is a hugely expensive Mac, but looking at the test results it's difficult to conclude that it offers value for money. If you really must have the fastest Mac around, go for it; otherwise, buy a dual 2.66GHZ Mac Pro, and add more Ram, a better graphics card and faster storage.