Mac Pro 3GHz

Ever since Apple decided to dump the PowerPC chip-set and announced Intel would be powering its machines, the creative community has been waiting for the launch of the Mac Pro. Along the way we’ve been tempted by the exceptional power and performance of firstly the remodelled iMac, then the Mac Book, then the Mac Book Pro. Yet it was the Mac Pro announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in August that really whetted the appetite.

This is the first glimpse of Apple’s first 64-bit workstation, and the exceptional specifications of the Mac Pro certainly justify the new name tag. There’s no doubt this is a workstation, and that it’s aimed squarely at professional users.

While the chassis has changed little from the proceeding G5, there has been a seismic shift on the inside. The new Intel 3.0GHz dual core processors are fully utilised by Mac OS X, providing a massive amount of processing power. In addition, the internal reshuffle of components has liberated enough space to allow the fitting of four SATA hard drives and two optical drives. The 250GB hard disk can be upgraded to four 500GB SATA II drives, which can easily be filled if you are working with uncompressed High-Definition video projects.

The empty optical drive bay may come in useful as an upgrade for either HD-DVD drives or Blu-Ray drives, which Apple has already indicated a preference for.

Connectivity has always been good on the G5, and the Mac Pro takes expansion a little further. Two-gigabit Ethernet ports can be complemented by wireless LAN and Bluetooth as options. Five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire ports offer plenty of potential for peripherals, and if you work with video the optical audio input and output connections will certainly come in useful.

To complement the processing power, the Mac Pro can now be expanded to 16GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, although in the model reviewed here we had 2GB of RAM installed. What’s more, there’s the potential to support up to eight displays by installing additional graphics cards in the PCI Express slots. As standard, the NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB is an all-round performer for most uses.

Raw performance
Our 3GHz Mac Pro was fitted with 2GB of RAM and a single 250GB hard drive. We benchmarked the machine with two main aims in mind: to show its performance running Universal or native code using tests such as Maxon’s Cinebench; and to run tests using Photoshop CS and InDesign CS to compare the performance of software running under the emulated Rosetta environment to that of a Dual Core 2.0GHz G5 fitted with 2GB of RAM.

To highlight the speed difference, the Mac Pro scores in the Cinebench rendering test with multiple CPUs were an impressive 1,547, compared to the G5’s much lower score of 532.

Image manipulation, rendering and compression are part and parcel of all creative disciplines, whether you’re working with Photoshop, video or 3D applications. The results of Cinebench are mirrored by those of Geekbench – a multi-platform multi-benchmark tool designed for Windows, Mac OS and Linux to provide comparable and independent results. The overall score of the Mac Pro was 372 compared to 180.7 for the G5.

Geekbench also features the ability to run the test using Rosetta, in which the Mac Pro scored noticeably higher than the G5. Not every aspect of the Mac Pro is faster, but the trend for computationally intensive tasks typically shows the same ration of speed gain of two to three times that of the old G5.

Real-world comparisons
We used Retouch Artists Photoshop Speed Test to test Rosetta in real-world environments. On the Mac Pro the test took 131.1 seconds, which actually beat the Dual Core G5, which took a slightly slower 133.3 seconds to complete. Other Photoshop tests showed the Mac Pro to be at a comparable speed to the G5, which surprised us considering the comparatively poor performance of the Intel iMac in similar tests. We used an AppleScript test to create a seven-page document with graphics and manipulation in InDesign – a task that took 71 seconds to complete on the Mac Pro, but just 59.6 seconds on the G5.

The native performance of the Mac Pro is faster than anything we have seen, but crucially, for most tasks the 3.0GHz Mac Pro offers a speed comparable to a typical G5 system. This level of performance makes it an attractive buy if you’re already running Universal software, yet won’t hinder your workflow too greatly while you work with the likes of Photoshop and InDesign.

It’s clear that the fast 1.33GHz bus and 667MHz DDR2 fully buffered RAM both play a significant part in providing exceptional performance, and you’ll find installing a second hard drive and using the software to RAID stripe the drives will provide additional performance gains. This is also true for Rosetta, particularly on tasks that use the scratch disk heavily, such as manipulating large image files. The Mac Pro offers no advantage if you only work with Adobe applications and already have a well specified G5 – until Adobe releases Creative Suite 3, that is.

Two apps in one box
If you use a mix of Universal Binary applications at the moment, and need the extra speed, the Mac Pro will deliver without compromising your ability to work with other applications through Rosetta. However, from benchmarks of the 2.66GHz and 2GHz models, certainly when they only have 1GB RAM, the speed through Rosetta is likely to be a real cause for concern.

The 3GHz Quad Xeon is pretty expensive, and even running native Universal applications may not make it significantly faster than Apple’s Quad Processor G5, but as the Mac Pro is now a PC you can run your Windows apps natively using Boot Camp. If you’re looking to upgrade on each OS, the Mac Pro offers you two platforms in one box.