Apple Mac Pro review

It's fair to say that any Apple product that comes through PC Pro's doors brings with it unfairly high expectations. We expect top-level industrial design, world-class performance, and, of course, a giddying price.

The core specification of the newest Mac Pro did nothing to dampen our hopes. At its heart lies a quad-core Intel Xeon W3520 running at 2.67GHz, helped by 3GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 RAM. The 45nm processor is based on Intel's Nehalem architecture, and as such is fresh out of Intel's fabrication plants, boasting all the features of the new Core i7 CPUs such as Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading. It also has an integrated memory controller, cutting the time it takes for the CPU to access system RAM.

Unsurprisingly, this quad-core powerhouse made spectacularly light work of our benchmarks, producing an overall score of 1.88. Even this doesn't tell the whole story. The Mac Pro's four cores pack an almighty punch when it comes to multitasking: you could use Adobe Premiere Pro in the foreground while rendering a project in the background and still have spare horsepower for Outlook, Word and more besides.

The rest of the Mac Pro's specification is similarly uncompromising. The 640GB Western Digital hard disk provides more than enough space for a full install of Adobe's Creative Suite 4 with plenty of room remaining. And, with a spin speed of 7,200rpm and 16MB cache, data bottlenecks should be kept to a minimum.

There are only a few disappointments. The first is the lack of Blu-ray: on such an expensive, top-end PC, it's strange not to see something that now appears on some sub-£1,000 laptops. And stranger still when you consider that the Mac Pro is easily powerful enough to edit HD video. The other peculiarity is the graphics card: the Nvidia GeForce GT 120 is fairly humble, and the proof was in our Crysis benchmark.

It's strange to see a PC for close to two grand score just 25fps at our medium settings. On the plus side, it's possible to specify up to four GT 120s in the system, for £313 before VAT, giving you the potential to run eight 30in TFTs from a single system. Alternatively, those looking for gaming potential can opt for the 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4870, available as a £139 option before VAT.

But as impressive as the core specification is, Apple's most impressive work is the design. Reach into virtually any other desktop case and you're all but guaranteed to catch a painful burr on the way out. The Mac Pro is made from beautifully-machined (and, Apple is keen to point out, recyclable) aluminium, and is completely modular.

The processor and RAM are on a daughterboard, which connects to the motherboard via a sliding tray. Unlock the catches on the daughterboard and it slides out. It's wireless, tool-free, and virtually impossible to put back incorrectly. Up to four hard disks live horizontally near the top of the chassis, each in its own metal housing. Sliding them out is simple and the SATA connectors are attached directly to the motherboard, so they mate with your disks without the need to blindly fiddle with cables. Apple claims, in fact, to have eliminated six feet of cabling since the last version of the Mac Pro, and the system is strikingly spare inside. The only place you'll see cabling is on the back of the DVD writer.

The front of the chassis is broadly featureless, but there's no mistaking this for anything other than Apple-designed. The front has a pair of USB ports and two FireWire 800 ports, and things are similarly sparse on the back. A pair of Gigabit Ethernet ports, two 3.5mm audio ports for audio in and out, and optical S/PDIF in and out ports. There are two more FireWire 800 ports, making this the first Mac Pro not to have a single FireWire 400 port; a potential annoyance for anyone with incompatible hardware. The only other disappointment is the USB ports - just three on the back makes a total of five, meaning anyone with a healthy complement of external hardware might swap ports a few times a day. On the plus side, the slim-but-solid keyboard has a pair of USB ports built in.