12:30 PM – Apple put the new Mac Pro on a diet and the end result was very well-put together machine. Featuring Intel Xeon E5 processors, the new Mac Pro is a beast. Not only that, you can make several upgrades to give your Mac Pro even more power. Since Apple announced that the first wave of shipment will take place starting December 31st, our friends over at MacWorld got their hands on a custom-configured Mac Pro earlier. They began to test it, and here’s what they came up with.
They spend $6,799 machine to custom-order their Mac Pro. It came with an 8-core 3.0GHz Xeon E5 processor, 32GB of RAM, 512GB of flash storage and dual AMD FirePro D700 graphics cards each with 6GB of dedicated video memory. Quite a beast, don’t you think? After going through several tests, they found that compared to the earlier Mac Pro models in the Speedmark 9 test, the new model shatters the previous score with a 312 score (63% better performance). The previous Mac Pro models scored a 191 at best.
Although it may seem like the new Mac Pro got a victory, there is also some disappointment. When putting the new Mac Pro against their previous top-machine, a configured to order 27-inch iMac, it was only 8% faster. James Galbraith of MacWorld says that “It should be no surprise that the new 8-core Mac Pro is the fastest Mac we’ve tested, but it was only 8 percent faster overall than our previous champ, a CTO 2013 27-inch iMac. That custom system has a speedy quad-core 3.5GHz Core i7 processor, a 3TB Fusion Drive, 8GB of RAM, and Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M graphics.”
It’s also worth noting that that their iMac machine cost them $2,699, which is $4,100 less than what they paid for the new Mac Pro. Of course there are many benefits to the new Mac Pro than just performance, however, you also should look at the cost and accessibility of machines in question.
What do you think?
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