Product Reviews

Apple's Mac Pro is a superb machine, but can the best so far be made any better? If you look on the Apple Store, you'll see just one model on offer. But click the Configure Now button and you'll be presented with a tasty array of options for fine-tuning the product's configuration and, of course, hitting your wallet that much harder. Many people need to have a little more than what comes as standard so, throwing caution and budget restrictions to the wind, we looked at what you can achieve if you go to town with the customisation options on the Apple Store.

First, the dual 2.66GHz processors were swapped for a pair of 3GHz models, a simple enough decision that cost £540. Then there was the Ram. It's good that Apple is no longer trying to claim that 512MB is enough to start with, but we raised the standard 1GB to a much more roomy 4GB. In our tests, this is the point at which Ram is essentially no longer any kind of bottleneck even when juggling large Photoshop files and complex page layouts at the same time. Apple's price for 4GB is £740, more than specialist memory retailers, such as Crucial charge, but at least it comes pre-installed.

Next came storage. A single 250GB Sata drive is OK, but for heavy-duty work, especially with audio and video, you need more space and even faster throughput. A 500GB Sata drive in each of the four independent bays gave us two terabytes of storage, one for the boot volume and the other three set up as a high-speed Raid array. This little splurge cost an additional £810, but for speed and space, this is the business.

Finally, the graphics card. Apple's standard offering is the Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT 256MB, a perfectly capable card for most needs. However, at the other end of the list, there's the 3D professional's dream, the Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 512MB. This costs a staggering £1120 extra, but it's one of the best graphics chipsets around and can drive two Apple 30in Cinema Displays.

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Heavy-duty Photoshop work is affected by processor speed most of all, although the extra 3GB of Ram is a definite benefit. Disk speed helps to an extent, so it is just the graphics card that is the true extravagance for this work. Curiously, while the processing-oriented test turned in an 18% increase, the creative-oriented test turned in a 5% speed decrease over a stock Mac Pro. Anomolies like this have to be laid at Rosetta's door; Photoshop is not yet a native Intel application, so its routines such as memory management can suffer - and it has more Ram than the 2.66GHz Mac Pro. The native Cinebench did somewhat better, although the 7.5% improvement in the multiple processor test didn't match the expected 33% step of going from 2.66GHz to 3GHz.

Quake 4 came next, with a standard time test that returns the average frames per second the 3D engine managed. This depends primarily on the graphics hardware and aims to show how effective the setup will be for more serious 3D work as well. A stock Mac Pro gets 50.04fps with high-quality rendering at 1024 x 768. Our wallet-busting upgrade card managed 64.51fps. Disappointing? The problem is with the framerate limit; Quake doesn't bother going much faster than about 60fps. When we turned the detail up to 'Ultra' (producing an 'are you sure?' warning) and chose 1600 x 1200 resolution we got a staggering 59.55fps, so yes, the card is amazingly fast.

Hard disk performance is excellent; Xbench clocks the setup at 64MB/sec for 256KB reads and writes, but the true benefit is the sustained, pause-free high throughput that the Sata-based Raid setup allows. This is software-based rather than dedicated hardware-controlled Raid, but it is managed by the Mac OS directly and makes good use of the internal Sata drives.

Should you consider talking sweetly to your bank manager about this Mac Pro setup? We think it isn't likely that you'd want to go all-out for everything we added, but you should consider your options carefully. You get better performance, certainly, but the price is high. If you have a real need for the best that's available - where processing time is money and your project budgets are flexible - then break out the plastic. The rest of us should prioritise, putting Ram and CPU upgrades first in the wish-list, then storage, and finally graphics hardware.