The standard contour of the Mac Pro outdo its PowerPC - based G5 predecessors by a wide leeway , helping to rationalize Apple ’s 2005 determination to tack to processor from Intel . What ’s more , the system powered by two dual - core 2.66GHz Xeon chips narrowly missed becoming the first machine to ever record a Speedmark score of over 300 .
Still , total a Speedmark 4.5 grudge of 299 in Macworld laboratory testing is nothing to sneeze at — especially in light of the fact that a few of the tests that make up Speedmark involve applications that do n’t yet run natively on Intel splintering . That means the Mac Pro was able to amend upon the Speedmark score of the Power Mac G5 Quad by 14 percentage , even though the collection of trial that comprises Speedmark include several which take Apple ’s Rosetta code - version technology .
Apple unveiled the Mac Pro at this week ’s Worldwide Developers Conference . Using two dual - centre Intel Xeon “ Woodcrest ” processor , the young Mac Pro occur in just one stock conformation , although Apple let you configure everything from the central processor speed to the installed RAM to the graphics card to the number of hard drives and optical drive that ship in your model — there ’s around five million possible configurations , according to Apple ’s marketing material .
We ’ve ordered Mac Pros in a few different configurations and will screen them as they get in . The first simple machine to follow in was the standard configuration — the $ 2,499 Dual - Core Mac Pro with two 2.66GHz Xeon processors , 1 GB of Fully - buffer DDR2 RAM , a 250 GB hard effort , a 16X SuperDrive with double - stratum living , and an Nvidia GeForce 7300GT graphic card . This out - of - the - box Mac Pro conformation earned the high Speedmark score ever recorded in our tests .
Mac Pro Benchmarks
Best results inbold . Reference system initalics .
Speedmark 4.5 grievance are proportional to those of a 1.25GHz Mac miniskirt , which is assign a score of 100 . Adobe Photoshop , Cinema 4D XL , iMovie , iTunes , and Finder scores are in hour : seconds . All systems were running Mac OS X 10.4.7 with 1 GB of RAM , with processor operation set to Highest in the Energy Saver predilection pane when applicable . The Photoshop Suite psychometric test is a bent of 14 written task using a 50 MB file . Photoshop ’s memory was rig to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum . We record how long it took to render a scene in Cinema 4D XL . We used Compressor to encode a 6minute:26second DV data file using the DVD : Fastest Encode 120 minutes – 4:3 setting . In iMovie , we applied the Aged video consequence to a 1 - minute picture . We converted 45 second of AAC audio files to MP3 using iTunes ’ High Quality setting . We used Unreal Tournament 2004 ’ Antalus Botmatch average - frames - per - second musical score ; we tested at a firmness of purpose of 1,024 by 768 pixels at the Maximum setting with both audio and graphics enable . We create a Zip archive in the Finder from a 1 GB leaflet . To compare Speedmark 4.5 scores for various Mac systems , visit our Apple Hardware Guide .—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Jerry Jung
As the results chart shows , in accession to having our highest Speedmark musical score , the Mac Pro send the best upshot in five of the seven individual tests we ’ve heel here . On some tests , such as rendering a vista in Cinema 4D , applying a TV effect in iMovie , or using Compressor to encode a movie into MPEG2 , the Mac Pro quiver out its precursor by just a few seconds . Other tests , such as make a Zip archive and unravel the Unreal Tournament 2004 Botmatch , the Mac Pro ’s lead widened—10 percent faster at archiving and 47 percent more frame per second in UT2004 than the fastest Power Mac G5 .
We await more newfangled Mac Pros to keep arriving in our lab for similar examination . We plan to continue testing this stock configuration , installing more computer memory to see how that move functioning ; using Boot Camp to install and head for the hills Windows , we also contrive to test the Mac Pro withPC populace ’s WorldBench 5 . With the telling resultant of this off - the - ledge theoretical account , I ca n’t hold off to get my hands on the new 3GHz system and at last blow past the 300 - score level on Speedmark .
[ James Galbraith is the Macworld Lab theater director . ]
