Product Reviews

It may have been released without the fanfare of a keynote speech or special event in its honour, but Apple's latest Mac Pro is an important step forward for the company's professional desktop line-up.

It's the first Mac range to feature Intel's Harpertown quad-core processor, and in its basic configuration ships with two of them running at 2.8GHz. Dual processor options with 3GHz and 3.2GHz processors are also available, as is a single processor, quad-core 2.8GHz model.

Harpertown is a 45nm, low-voltage processor, which dissipates significantly less heat and therefore requires less cooling, and thus consumes less power, than previous Xeon processors shipped in the Mac Pro. The processors have 12MB of Level 2 cache, split as 6MB per pair of cores, allowing each core to grab all 6MB when necessary. The dual 1600MHz frontside buses shuttle data between processor and system controller at up to 2.5GB/sec, a 20% improvement on the previous Mac Pro according to Apple. Memory throughput has also been improved, by 160%, according to the company's figures.

The basic memory configuration is 2GB in a pair of 1GB 800MHz DDR2 fully-buffered Dimms. Given that the Pro has a maximum capacity of 32GB in eight slots, and that even the MacBook now ships with 2GB Ram, the Mac Pro's base specification seems miserable. And the usual warnings about buying memory from Apple in order to upgrade apply: don't. Third-party dealers will charge you a fraction of the price and fitting it in the Mac Pro is child's play.

If the standard Ram provision is miserable, it's at least matched by the capacity of the hard drive. To include a 320GB drive, and charge an additional £60 to upgrade it to 500GB, at a time when a 500GB 7200rpm Sata drive can be bought and installed alongside the existing 320GB drive for the same price shows an astonishing lack of awareness of current market pricing. To ship a £1749 professional computer with a hard drive below 500GB is, frankly, astonishing, particularly when the Pro's consumer sibling, the iMac, has a 500GB drive.

ADVERTISEMENT

The Mac Pro does score highly in its ability to house up to 4TB of storage in its four drive bays and in its support for hardware Raid using the optional Mac Pro Raid card and for 15,000rpm serial attached storage drives.

The standard graphics controller is an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB Ram, a decent mid-range card with two dual-link DVI ports, and a step up from the Nvidia GeForce 7300GT shipped with last year's Mac Pro models. There are also other graphics controller options available, including the ability to add a further three Radeon HD 2600s in order to drive eight, 30in displays. If you earn a living from 3D graphics however, you might want to go for Nvidia's GeForce 8800GT or Quadro FX 5600 instead.

It's worth noting that the Mac Pro has a total of four PCI Express slots, and so if you plan on installing say, a Raid card and a fibre channel controller, you'll be limited to two graphics cards. Bear in mind too, that two of the Mac Pro's four slots are PCI Express 2 slots with twice the bandwidth of the slower interfaces.

Other options include the ability to add to the Mac Pro's 16x Superdrive with another 16x Superdrive. However, there is no option to add a Blu-ray drive, which will no doubt infuriate anyone who was hoping that now that the format war is settled Apple would add a high-capacity optical drive at the very least as an option. You can also add 802.11n wifi support - something which, interestingly, is included as standard with every other Mac - but not Bluetooth, despite the presence of a Bluetooth logo on the build-to-order page on the Apple Store.

In our tests, the Mac Pro didn't live up to Apple's claims of being twice as fast as the quad-core 2.66GHz model. It showed a 35% improvement in processor performance in our benchmarks and a 50% increase using the Cinebench graphics benchmarking suite. That's still a very decent return and we have no qualms over its performance.

It's the base specification that lets the Mac Pro down. Only 2GB Ram and 320GB hard drive is just not good enough for a professional workstation. Also, the lack of a Blu-ray drive is disappointing. We just feel there is something better around the corner. This update seems to have been rushed out so that Apple could ship a Harpertown Mac rather than because it had spent several months working on a machine that would do justice to its professional customers.

It may be understandable that at a time when it's focusing on the iPhone, Apple has concentrated less on the Mac Pro. That has to change if the company wants to build on the excellent platform it's made for itself in the creative professional market.