Mac Pro review

The end of one era, the beginning of another

Mac Pro
Manufacturer: Apple Computer (product page)
Price as configured: $2,499 (shop for this item)

I thought I was getting a new Macintosh PC. Instead, the box said "Quad Xeon 64-bit workstation." It was then that it really hit me—the Big Switch was over and my once shiny Power Macintosh G5 was yesterday's news.

The introduction of the new, yet familiar-looking Mac Pro at the Worldwide Developers Conference (along with the updated Xserve) closed the book on the PowerPC's 12-year run in Apple's product lineup. And it all happened so fast. Just last year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs stood in front of the gathered masses and dropped the big bombshell.

Apple's initial timeframe was conservative. The first Intel system would ship by June 6, 2006, with the transition complete sometime in 2007. Instead, Apple was able to accelerate its schedule, unveiling the first two Intel Macs at Macworld San Francisco this past January. The iMac Core Duo and MacBook Pro were joined by the Mac mini in March and the MacBook in May.

Making the transition easier for Apple was Intel's new Core Duo chip. Available at the beginning of 2006, Yonah (aka, Core Duo) was a good fit across much of Apple's product line, with two notable exceptions: the Xserve and Power Macintosh. Both of those needed something beefier than a 32-bit processor and thanks to Intel's roadmap, we all knew what it was and when it would be coming. Sure enough, Jobs delivered the goods at the WWDC keynote

Tech specs

The Xeon 5100 series

Better known by its code name Woodcrest, the Xeon 5100 series provides the brains for Apple's new Mac Pro towers. Although it shares a name with Intel's longstanding server-centric CPU, the 5100s are different beasts from their Netburst predecessors. They are built on the same Core architecture as Merom (Core 2 Duo) laptop CPUs and the just-released desktop CPU Conroe (also Core 2 Duo).

Apple is using three Xeons across the Mac Pro line: the 5130 (2.0GHz), 5150 (2.66GHz), and the 5160 (3.0GHz). The default configuration for the Mac Pro uses Van Halen's favorite CPU, the Xeon 5150, with the 5130 and 5160 available as build-to-order options for $300 less and $800 more, respectively. Since the machine being reviewed has the 5150, I'll just touch on that processor. However, the CPUs are identical except for the speed. A detailed look at the Xeon architecture is outside the scope of this review, but we can hit a few of the highlights of the 5150.

Introduced in June, the Xeon 5100 series is a 64-bit CPU intended primarily for use in servers and high-performance workstations. In fact, Intel prefers that vendors using the Xeon in desktop computers call them "workstations" rather than "PCs," hence the prominent "64-bit workstation" labeling on the box.

Like the other Core and Core 2 processors, the Xeon 5150 is fabricated using a 65nm process. It's also a dual-core chip, which is why Apple refers to the Mac Pro as a "Quad Xeon": two CPUs, four cores. Each 5150 has 4MB of L2 cache which is shared between the two cores. The Mac Pro also features 1333MHz, 64-bit dual independent frontside buses, meaning that each Xeon has its own dedicated bus to the northbridge.

When it comes to heat, the Xeon 5150 runs cooler than its Netburst predecessors. It has a thermal design power of 65 watts (the 5160 has a TDP of 80W), which is a big improvement over its predecessor's 135W TDP. IBM has not released the TDP figures for the PowerPC 970MP powering the last G5s, so a direct comparison is impossible. Keep in mind that whatever the figure, it was high enough to require liquid cooling.

Detailed tech specs

Exterior

Just as the iMac Core Duo appeared to be very similar to its PowerPC predecessor, the Mac Pro looks a lot like a Power Macintosh G5 tower at first glance. The enclosure is almost identical to my G5 tower, at least on the outside. The biggest changes are an increase in the number of ports on front and back, a second optical drive bay, and the movement of the power supply from the bottom of the case to the more industry-standard top. It's the same size (20.1" x 8.1" x 18.7") as the G5 tower, but weighs 2.1lb less (insert monstrous G5 heat sink joke here).

If you liked the cheese-grater-like design of the Power Macintosh G5, you'll like the Mac Pro. From the front, the two machines look somewhat similar, with the biggest difference being the addition of a slot for a second optical drive. That's right, you can now put more than one optical drive in your Mac tower (and more than two hard drives inside)—more on that later.

Aside from the extra optical drive door, there are a couple more ports on the front. The headphone, USB, and FireWire 400 ports have been joined by a second USB 2.0 and a single FireWire 800 port for easy connection of peripherals.

Front view

On the back, things are similar to the last iteration of the Power Macintosh G5 series. In fact, the Mac Pro has the same 11 ports, but laid out differently: 3 USB 2.0, 1 FireWire 400, 1 FireWire 800, digital audio in and out, analog audio in and out, and a pair of gigabit Ethernet ports.

Rear view

Similar to the G5, the Mac Pro comes with a latch on the back. In addition to opening and closing the case, the latch also holds the hard drive bays in place.

The only other difference in the case is the clear side panel present in the Power Macintosh G5. That allowed users to run their G5s with the side aluminum panel off so they could gaze lovingly on the huge heatsinks and the rest of Apple's design choices that enabled the PowerPC 970 to run at reasonable temperatures. In fact, the Power Macintosh G5 needed the clear plastic panel in place while running to ensure adequate air cooling. The Mac Pro lacks the plastic panel.

The Power Macintosh G5. Look familar?

Those are the major differences, and aside from the extra optical drive door, they look fairly minor cosmetically. The extra ports on the front are a welcome addition, especially with the number of USB and FireWire peripherals I have hooked up to my Power Macintosh G5. At last count, I had 8 USB devices (keyboard, trackball, Radio Shark, iPod, flash card reader, scanner, and USB headset), 3 FireWire 400 devices (EyeTV, iSight, hard drive), and a single FireWire 800 hard drive enclosure. So if you're a USB and/or FireWire peripheral junkie like me, you'll appreciate the extra ports.

So the exterior is much the same, which was a minor disappointment to those wondering what Jonathan Ive and his industrial design gnomes have been up to since the Power Macintosh G5 was unveiled. But the interior? That's another matter...

Inside the Mac Pro

Once you flip the latch in back and take off the side panel, the true magnitude of the change from the Power Macintosh G5 to the Mac Pro hits.

It's downright spacious in there.

The redesign of the interior addresses nearly every one of the criticisms I leveled at Apple for the Power Macintosh G5. To refresh your memory, the vast majority of the dual-CPU G5's interior was taken up by the heatsinks, liquid cooling system, and fans. To even get to the DIMM slots, you had to pull out the rather large fans. The PCIe/PCI/AGP slots were crammed together above the heatsinks, and above that, there was room for only two hard drives and a single optical drive.

Side view

By way of contrast, the Mac Pro has a lot more room inside, at least for hard drives and optical drives. Let's head on in and take a look, moving from top to bottom.

A "naked" side view courtesy of PowerMax Computers

Optical drive

The top quarter of the case interior is taken up by the optical drive bays and power supply. The power supply is inaccessible, but the optical drive cage comes out quite easily. Insert your fingers into the two openings and the cage slides out easily. Detach the IDE cable and power cable, and you can remove the entire cage.

The optical drive bay slides right out of the case

Installation of a second drive is as simple as sliding the drive in, attaching it with a couple of screws, and plugging in a cable. At least that's what the tidy little Mac Pro User's Guide says; I don't have a spare optical drive laying around at the moment. I did have to remove the drive cage to manually eject a balky Windows installation CD with a paper clip. Taking it out was very simple, lessening the frustration of having a CD stuck in the drive.

Hard drives

Here's where the Mac Pro really shines over its PPC predecessor. Running the entire length of the case are four hard drive bays, notable because Apple hasn't shipped a machine that could support four hard drives in over three years. Not too impressive if you're used to ATX cases with six bays, but darned nice-looking coming off of three years of the Power Macintosh G5 and two bays.

Installation is a snap with these four carriers

All four bays have carriers installed; in the case of my Mac Pro, only the first was occupied with a hard drive. You can order your Mac Pro with up to four 500GB SATA-II hard drives, but that gets expensive very quickly. I ordered a pair of 500GB Maxtors and dropped them right in there. Installation is very simple: you pull out the carrier, lay it on top of the hard drive, attach the drive with the four screws already in the carrier, and slide it into the Mac Pro. The first drive took me about 90 seconds to install, and the second about 30 seconds. Very easy, and they both showed up when I powered on the tower.

Drive carrier with attached hard drive

There are no cables to mess with at all, making the whole thing a very nice improvement over the already-decent G5 installation procedure. I would say that this was the easiest drive installation I've ever done in a desktop, and I've done a fair amount in both Mac systems (dating back to Power Macintosh 7600) and PCs (mini ATX, ATX, and Shuttles). Kudos to Apple for getting the hard drive expansion right. Now if only they had gone with a 16MB cache drive instead of 8MB for the included hard drive (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9)...

The Coelestial Aether

The Bluetooth and AirPort Express ports located
towards the center in the top half of the picture

Continuing our tour of the Mac Pro's interior, we come to the center area. Directly underneath drive bay number two are the connectors for the Mac Pro's wireless connectivity. That is, if you choose the wireless options available when you purchased your Mac Pro.

For whatever reason (cost?), Apple's pro desktop is the only computer across its entire product lineup lacking built-in 802.11b/g and Bluetooth. Both are available as a build-to-order option, so that means a custom configuration and a longer wait for a new machine. Your alternative is trucking your Mac Pro down to the Apple Store to have the respective modules installed there.

If you go with the default configuration—like me—this area will be looking mighty empty. Granted, most Mac Pros will be used in environments where they will be able to take advantage of a wired network, so the lack of AirPort Express functionality makes more sense. But leaving out Bluetooth is a head-scratcher, as some of us have Bluetooth phones and peripherals we could use with our Mac Pros.

PCI Express and other goodies

Similar to its predecessor, the Mac Pro offers three additional PCI Express expansion slots. What's particularly nice is that slot 1 is double-wide, meaning that you can drop in a monster video card without it blocking another open slot.

At top are the four PCIe slots. The RAM risers are below

The slots themselves are fed from both the north- and southbridges, using a set of muxes to determine what slots are fed and from which chip. Ultimately, they all end up back at the northbridge.

By default, the Mac Pro is configured with slot 1 set at 16 lanes (x16), slot 2 at x1, and slots 3 and 4 at x4. The AirPort Express slot mentioned above uses a single lane. If you don't like that set-up, you can switch from x16, x1, x4, x4 to one of the following configurations:

• x8, x8, x1, x8
• x8, x8, x4, x4
• x16, x1, x1, x8

The last one would appear to the best if you're adding another video card. I've got an ATI Radeon X1900XT on order, which I'll drop to slot 1 while moving the NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT over to slot 4. Unfortunately, the lack of ability to have two 16-lane slots going at the same time rules out x16 Crossfire and SLI configurations. This is a limitation of the Intel 5000X chipset, which can only support 28 total PCI Express lanes. Assuming Crossfire or SLI video cards become available for the Mac Pro, there is no reason why it wouldn't be able to handle an x8 Crossfire or SLI configuration.

If you want more details on the Mac Pro's PCIe implementation, you can get them straight from the horse's mouth.

CPUs and heatsink

As we come to the bottom of the case, we find the fan (maybe a bit bigger than that of the G5 tower) located directly under the first hard drive bay. Directly under the AirPort/Bluetooth area is where our trusty Xeon 5150s live. Mac reseller PowerMax Computers took the first Mac Pro they received apart and graciously allowed us to use these pictures.

The heatsinks inside and outside of the case

As you can see, the heat sinks are very large. Way down at the bottom of all that cooling goodness are the Xeons themselves.

You gotta have fans

It's obvious that the switch to the Xeon 5100 series eliminated most of the cooling headaches Apple had with the PowerPC 970 processors. To refresh your memory, check out the liquid cooling and heatsink contraption from the Dual 2.5GHz Power Macintosh G5.

Remember these?

That appears to be the most significant factor in the redesign of the interior space. Less space needed for cooling very hot processors means more space for useful things like hard drives and DVD burners.

RAM

Apple has switched RAM yet again, as the Xeon 5150 requires fully-buffered DIMMs. I'll discuss those further in another section; here, I want to focus on adding and subtracting RAM.

Instead of having to reach deep into the bowels of your case to slip the RAM into the slots, the Mac Pro uses a handy riser system. All you have to do is reach in, slide out the risers, insert your new RAM, and slide the risers back in. It works very smoothly.

My, what big heatsinks you have!

There are eight slots in total, four on each card. The slots are spaced wider than usual, which is necessary given the gargantuan heat sinks Apple is using on its chips. Apple says that it is using the heat sinks to "ensure that the fans run at the proper speed to maintain the optimal temperature and ensure acoustic performance." FB-DIMMs with conventionally sized heatsinks will work in the Mac Pro, although Apple recommends Apple-approved heatsinks "for optimum performance and acoustics."

Architecture

Having looked at the exterior and interior of the Mac Pro, let's delve a bit deeper into the actual components: the video card, RAM, and northbridge-southbridge combination.

Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT

When I was speculating about what the Mac Pro might look like, I figured we'd see something along the lines of the ATI Radeon X1900XT, or possibly an NVIDIA GeForce 7800. What we got instead is the lesser-known GeForce 7300GT.

The GeForce 7300GT is similar to the 7600GT and uses the same G73 chip, albeit with fewer functional units.

In terms of pipelines, the 7300GT trails its higher-numbered NVIDIA siblings as well as the Radeon X1900XT. Here's the lowdown

You'll notice that some of the figures for the 7300GT fall within a pretty large range. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't divulge the nitty-gritty details like exact core clockspeed in the documentation for the Mac Pro or the Developer Note. I'm guessing that the 7300GT falls into the middle.

While it is capable of running the monstrous 30" Apple LCD, the 7300GT is otherwise an average video card. In terms of performance, it's closer to the ATI Radeon 1600 found in the iMac than the GeForce 7600GT. It's a step up from the standard GeForce 6600 from the last Power Macintosh G5, but not a huge one.

The pairing of an extremely powerful CPU and an underpowered GPU seems an odd one, but the Xeon 5150-GeForce 7300GT odd couple is likely what keeps the price points where they are. It's unfortunate that Apple chooses to cut corners with the graphics, but at least they are consistent. When I reviewed the Power Mac G5 two years ago, I faulted Apple for including the Radeon 9600XT as the default video card. The card has changed, but the result is the same: a subpar graphics card in an otherwise very-powerful machine. For $350 more, you can configure one with a 512MB ATI Radeon X1900XT.

Memory: FB-DIMM

In contrast to the video card, Apple made an excellent choice by going with the Xeon/fully buffered RAM combo. Of course, the Xeon 5100s require DDR2 FB-DIMMs, and the Xeon is the only one of Intel's Core CPUs that can be run in a dual-CPU configuration, so there was really not a lot of choice on Apple's part.

That said, FB-DIMMs make the most sense in the Mac Pro. FB-DIMMs are wired differently than regular DDR2 and as a result, have more to offer than good old DDR2 when it comes to speed, capacity, and reliability.

First off, it uses different paths for transmitting and receiving data, in contrast to standard DDR, which does both over the same pathway. This leads to better memory subsystem performance.

FB-DIMMs also use serial communication as opposed to the parallel communication of regular DIMMs. It's similar to how ATA (parallel) and SATA work on hard drives. Serial communication makes for fewer wires, more channels, and ultimately faster speed.

The result is up to 24x greater capacity, four times the bandwidth, and a lower pin count. Oh, and it's more expensive. But you probably already guessed that.

Bridging the gap

On the Mac Pro's motherboard are the northbridge and southbridge. The northbridge interfaces with the two Xeon 5150s via their 1333MHz FSBs. It also handles the memory banks via two branches containing two channels each and PCI Express slot number 1.

The southbridge interfaces with the northbridge via an x8 PCIe bus and an x4 Enterprise Southbridge Interface (ESI). It handles just about everything else: PCIe slots 2-4, the USB 2.0 controller, Ethernet, audio, optical and hard drives, FireWire, and the EFI boot ROM.

This layout differs a bit from that of the dual-core G5s. Those had a memory controller and PCI bus bridge at one end, which interfaced with the memory and PCIe graphics. In the middle is the PCIe bridge, which handled the other PCIe graphic slots and the dual gigabit Ethernet ports. That bridge communicates with the memory controller via a 16-bit HyperTransport connection and the I/O device and disk controller at the other end via an 8-bit HyperTransport connection. The I/O device and disk controller handle FireWire, USB, and the drive controllers.

The difference is subtle, but significant. While the 16-bit HyperTransport connection in the G5 is capable of up to 4.8GBps, the 8-bit bus is limited to 1.6GBps. In contrast, the x8 PCIe bus connecting the northbridge and southbridge in the Mac Pro speeds along at up to 4.0Gbps with the x4 ESI interface adding an additional 1GBps of bandwidth in each direction.

There's plenty of bandwidth to go around, folks.

Usage

Going from a Dual 2.5GHz Power Macintosh G5 to a quad-core 2.66GHz Xeon doesn't feel that much different under normal usage. Both machines feel about as equally responsive, although the Mac Pro appears to boot up much quicker. Really, under everyday load, this machine doesn't feel that different than the other Macs I use on a day-to-day basis (the aforementioned G5 and iMac) although it's far more responsive than my PowerBook G4.

Software-wise, the Mac Pro is fairly minimalist. Aside from the applications bundled with Mac OS X, you get a complete version of iLife '06 (iTunes, iMovie HD, iDVD, iWeb, Garage Band), Comic Life (an application used to add silly captions to photos), Omni Outliner, as well as trial versions of Microsoft Office 2004, iWork '06, and FileMaker Pro 8.5. Nothing too spectacular, and definitely not worth spending any more time on in the review.

In terms of noise, the Mac Pro runs quieter than the Power Macintosh G5. In fact, it appears to be a very quiet computer, and even when the CPU spikes and hard drive thrashes about, the machine doesn't sound too loud. Heatwise, it's impossible to say at this point. Temperature Monitor, an application that can monitor CPU and other temperatures throughout your Mac, isn't ready for the Mac Pro yet.

The two biggest questions with usage will likely be "how well does Windows run?" and "how well do non-Universal-Binary applications run?" In short, good and good. Once I was able to get Windows installed and running, it was great (albeit odd). Rosetta application performance was also solid. I'll deal with the performance benchmarks in a later section; for now, let's talk about getting Windows installed.

Windows XP on the Mac Pro

With the ability to run Windows both natively and virtually via Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop, respectively, the Mac Pro will undoubtedly appeal to some users who want a high-performance workstation capable of running multiple operating systems natively. I fall in that category—in addition to my G5 I have a Shuttle PC with an aging Pentium 4 processor—and I'm hopeful that the Mac Pro will kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

However, getting Windows up and running on the Mac Pro is easier said than done.

Parallels Desktop

The short version is that Parallels Desktop won't yet run on a Mac Pro. Parallel's tech support is aware of the issue and another Mac Pro user is reporting the same issue that I had on their support forums. After installing Parallels Desktop for Mac, I was able to go through the steps of creating a virtual machine. Starting it was another matter. Each time I did so, my display slowly dimmed as the Mac Pro kernel panicked. I tried the beta update for Parallels Desktop, with the same result.

I have no doubt that Parallels will get Parallels Desktop for Mac running without a hitch on the Mac Pro. In fact, the support people there have indicated that they will have a Mac Pro compatible revision out ASAP. Early adopters beware: you'll have to wait for virtualization on Apple's latest machines.

Boot Camp

The other alternative is Boot Camp. I grabbed my copy of Windows XP SP2, launched Boot Camp, and started down the road to running Windows.

I'm not going to cover how Boot Camp works here. If you're interested in an in-depth exploration of the subject, check out our guide "Heading Off to Boot Camp." I did notice two things that will be of interest to Mac Pro owners. First, Boot Camp isn't aware of multiple drives. When prepping for a Windows install from the Mac side of things, you'll want to grab the NVIDIA GeForce driver installation utility along with Intel's network drivers for the Xeon chipset and the chipset drivers themselves. That is because Apple has not yet released Windows drivers for the Mac Pro.

Unfortunately, Boot Camp is only "aware" of the startup drive. There is no option to partition or format any additional drives you might have installed in the system, so I created a minute partition on the 250GB primary drive and started the Windows installation process. When I begin installing Windows, it noticed that I had other drives available, so I did a quick NTFS format of a 500GB drive and proceeded with the Windows installation routine. Things went as expected and I was ultimately booted into Windows XP... in all of its 4-bit, 640x480 glory.

Using the driver CD I had burned, I installed the NVIDIA drivers and Intel drivers, rebooted, and I was ready to rock Windows on my Mac. With the drivers installed, I had network connectivity and all the functionality I needed for my system.

Again, I'll get into the benchmarks later. But in short, using Windows on the Mac Pro was a very pleasant experience. The hardware and software felt zippy, and everything... just worked.

Benchmarks

The purpose of this benchmark section is not so much to provide the "objective truth" on how well the systems being measured perform. Instead, we're trying to paint a picture of how different systems perform against one another using the same set of applications (when possible).

Our benchmark applications are divided into four buckets: Mac OS X Universal Binary benchmarks, Mac OS X Rosetta benchmarks, cross-platform benchmarks, and Windows XP benchmarks. Since the Universal Binary applications run native on both PowerPC and Intel Macs, they are used to test the Macs on the same tasks.

However, the population of Universal Binaryland is not where it will be in another year or so. That means our Intel Macs will be running PowerPC native applications using Apple's Rosetta translation technology. In light of that, we're including a couple of benchmarks to illustrate how the Mac Pro does with a couple of platform stalwarts that have yet to make an appearance in Universal Binary format.

The only cross-platform benchmark we performed was Cinemabench 9.5. We ran that one on the Mac Pro under Windows and Mac OS X.

Lastly, we want to see how well the Mac Pro does Windows. So we're running a small handful of Windows benchmarks.

Test systems

• Mac Pro
  • 1GB PC2-5300 FB-DDR2
  • NVIDIA GeForce 7300GT (256MB)
  • 2 x 2.66GHz Xeon 5100 CPUs (dual-core)
• Power Macintosh G5
  • 1GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
  • ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (256MB)
  • 2 x 2.5GHz PowerPC 970FX CPUs (single-core)
• iMac Core Duo (17")
  • 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2
  • ATI Radeon X1600 (128MB)
  • 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo T2400 (dual-core)

We'll also refer back to results from earlier reviews of Intel Macs as needed.

Mac OS X Universal benchmarks

Our Universal Binary testing consisted of two application tests and one benchmark suite. For the application testing, we used iTunes to rip  "Under Attack," the newest album by The Alarm. It was ripped to 256kbps AAC with variable bit-rate encoding. Secondly, we exported a 24.6MB QuickTime movie using QuickTime Pro. The target device was the iPod (320x240), using the default settings.

One problem with testing CD ripping speeds is the speed of the optical drives involved. The Mac Pro and G5 both read CDs at 32x while the iMac reads at 24x. As you can see, the Mac Pro was significantly faster than the Power Macintosh G5 and much, much faster than the iMac Core Duo. The Core Duo runs at 1.83GHz, compared with the 2.66GHz for the Xeon. The clockspeed differential and the difference in drive speeds probably combine to account for the majority of the performance difference, with the Mac Pro's improved memory subsystem taking up the rest.

In this case, the Mac Pro's advantage was less pronounced. However, it still trounced the Core Duo iMac while beating the Power Macintosh G5 by a few seconds.

The Mac Pro scored lower at first, due to its poor performance on Quartz graphics and being absolutely horrid in the user interface test, which is likely due to Quartz beam sync.

After using a free utility to turn on the Quartz debugger tools and disable Quartz beam sync, I reran the benchmarks. The difference was stunning, as the Quartz graphics did much better and the user interface test did better by almost a factor of 40. The charts above reflect the Xbench being run with Quartz beam sync off. (The iMac Core Duo was also tested with Quartz beam sync off; the MacBook Pro scores are from when we reviewed it several months ago.) For reference, with Quartz beam sync turned on, the scores were as follows:

• Quartz graphics: 111.01
• User interface: 13.22
• Overall score: 58.77

In the CPU test, it lagged behind the Power Mac G5 in floating point and vector routines, but killed in the thread test. The faster memory subsystem helped it to a victory in the memory tests, and the four cores enabled it to shine in the thread test.

I'm happy to take suggestions for other Universal Binary benchmarks in the discussion thread. Provided I have access to applications, I'll run the benchmarks and post them in Infinite Loop over the next week or so.

Mac OS X Rosetta benchmarks

We did two benchmarks of PowerPC applications on both the Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro. First up was a simple Microsoft Word scroll test. We took at 1,609-page, 10.8MB document and scrolled from top to bottom using the scroll-down arrow. Our other test was that old bakeoff reliable, Photoshop. In this case, we used PSBench 7 to perform 21 actions in Photoshop CS2 on both systems.

As you can see, scrolling was significantly faster on the Power Macintosh G5 than the Mac Pro. In general PowerPoint, Excel, and Word usage, however, I have found the Mac Pro to be more than adequate. Most importantly, they don't feel slow.

For the most part, Photoshop showed a clear advantage for the G5. That said, the Mac Pro pulled out ahead on three of the actions and drew even on one other. The only place where the Mac Pro was trounced was on the Pointillize and Halftone filters. Subjectively, Photoshop felt "fast enough." But if you're working in a creative shop and rely on Photoshop, Illustrator, or other applications that have yet to make the transition to Universal Binary, then you will likely be better served by waiting until Intel-native versions of those applications arrive.

Cross-platform benchmark

Here, the benchmark of choice is Cinebench 9.5. It has the advantage of being available as a Universal Binary on Mac OS X and for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP. We ran Cinebench on a freshly booted machine (as we did our other apps).

Cinebench fared very nicely both on Windows and Mac OS X with the Mac Pro. As you can see, the Mac Pro was consistently faster than the G5 no matter what the platform. Cinebench was a hair faster under Mac OS X. Keep in mind the driver situation though: no official drivers from Apple, just enough to drive the video card and networking.

Windows only benchmarks

For Windows benchmarking, we used 3DMark 06 and SiSoft Sandra 07. If you're running Windows, feel free to download the two applications and see how your system measures up against the Mac Pro.

Running 3DMark 06, the Mac Pro scored 1645 overall.

Conclusions

After poking, prodding, booting, and rebooting Apple's latest and greatest, the big question is whether all the anticipation was worth it. First, did Apple adequately address the flaws of the previous pro desktop design? Second, is the performance of the Mac Pro fitting for a product at the top of Apple's heap?

Although the Mac Pro uses the same enclosure as the Power Macintosh G5, Apple has made some small changes on the outside and bigger ones on the inside. More ports in the front means it's easier to plug and unplug devices, and additional USB 2.0 ports means fewer hubs. I do miss the modem, since I've been using my G5 to receive faxes.

The interior layout is a big win for Apple. Four drive bays is adequate for a pro tower, although support for something little better than 7200rpm SATA would have been nice. It's also great having room for a second optical drive. Adding a second DVD burner, extra hard drives, and RAM are all very straightforward and simple operations. The layout of the interior is very well done and everything is easy to get to. Putting the graphics card in a double wide slot so that it doesn't block another PCIe slot is another smooth choice.

In terms of performance, it's good news—with a caveat. While the fully-buffered memory, the screaming-fast Xeon 5150s, and the 1333MHz FSB are all great, Apple's video card choice is most definitely not. It's like having a can of Schlitz with filet mignon, or having an oompah band play Oktoberfest at Carnegie Hall. It doesn't fit, and it detracts from the overall experience. The ATI Radeon X1900XT offered as a build-to-order option would have been a fantastic choice for the default video card, but given Apple's desire for a $2,499 price tag and high margins, that was not an option. Still, one of the GeForce 7600s would have been a more appropriate choice.

A pair of x16 PCIe slots would have been nice as well. Unfortunately, Intel doesn't have a Xeon chipset capable of support that at this point. Perhaps down the road.