Apple's Mac Pro - A True PowerMac Successor
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 16, 2006 12:27 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Test
We tested a total of five configurations throughout all of our tests: a dual socket (single core) PowerMac G5 2.0GHz, a dual socket (single core) PowerMac G5 2.5GHz, a dual socket (dual core) Mac Pro 2.0GHz and a dual socket (dual core) Mac Pro 2.66GHz. The fifth configuration was the dual socket dual core Mac Pro 2.0GHz with one socket disabled, thus running as a dual core Mac Pro 2.0GHz. The reason for this fifth configuration is to help point out the areas where the Mac Pro is doing better than the PowerMac G5 simply due to its four cores (vs. two in the G5) and where the advantage is purely architectural.
We kept configurations as close as possible, each system featured 2GB of memory (the Mac Pros used 4 x 512MB FB-DIMMs in order to run in quad channel mode) and used the same Seagate 7200.9 250GB HDD.
Video cards could not be kept controlled since the PowerMac G5 systems used AGP cards while the Mac Pros used PCIe cards; for this reason we did not run any GPU bound tests and thus there should be no tangible difference in performance due to the differing graphics cards. The G5s used a 256MB ATI Radeon 9600 Pro while the Mac Pros used a 256MB GeForce 7300 GT.
All systems used the latest updates to the OS and all software as of the time of publication.
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Could you show me how to get Dell to take $149 off for the monitor? Whenever I try to configure it if I select the "No Monitor" option it lists a cost of $0, meaning I don't gain or lose anything.The Dell protection plan is truly enterprise class however the point of the comparison was to look at things from a purely hardware/cost of components perspective, which is how these Mac vs. PC price comparisons are usually done. Once you go above and beyond that then you get into this slippery slope argument of how much you should tack on for the price of being able to run OS X, etc...
Take care,
Anand
delta53 - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
The "they" was referring to Apple namely at the WWDC6, no offence Anand. The option is given under the Medium and Large business section, but your point is well taken that exact price is impossible in that section.Keep up the good reports,
Kyle
Furen - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I was under the impression that Cinebench had very light memory usage. It looks to me that what will make or break Woodcrest's "power efficiency" is going to be FBDIMM power so perhaps loading up the ram will paint slightly different numbers...TamarinMonkey - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Now that we can run both OSX and XP on the same hardware, I'd be interested to see some of the benchmarks run on both OSs and see how they do. Any plans to do this in a future article?~Tam~
retrospooty - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
I am pretty sure this has been done, and OSX has been found to be lacking, especially in 3d games. The speed advantage of PC over MAC was not that Intel/AMD were so much faster than IBM G4, then G5, but the OS and drivers are much finer tuned.Tegeril - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
It was definitely not so much about the OS/Drivers being finer tuned in regards to 3D gaming. It was definitely a DirectX versus OpenGL issue.psychobriggsy - Thursday, August 17, 2006 - link
More specifically, Apple's OpenGL implementation on PowerPC was/is severely lacking.I wonder if the Intel Mac OS X drivers are better - i.e., the ATI/Nvidia drivers ported to Mac OS X.
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I just played WoW last night on my Quadro 4500-equiped Mac Pro. An ATI version should be similar. I was in a 40 man raid for my guild. This thing screams in OS X. I get 30-40 fps in a crowded IF, 50-100 fps flying, and I peaked at 135 fps looking at the sky. All at 1920x1200. The drivers sure have improved and I think are better on intel. I have a 2.3 Ghz dual core G5 and this is twice as fast even thought the G5 had a 7800 GT card. Oh - and I never noticed the fans spin up during the raid even though I had low sound volume.Rumor has it that OpenGL will be much improved when it goes multithreaded in 10.4.8. We will see. :)
Konq - Monday, September 11, 2006 - link
I forgot to mention: the Mac Pro loaded the WoW AQ40 instance in about 2 seconds! Faster even the second time. I can't express how impressed I am with this machine.As a side note, I used Office in Rosetta, and it is as fast as my G5. Maybe 4GB of RAM helps here but I was worried after reading Anands' report.
Pirks - Wednesday, August 16, 2006 - link
Please use XP x64 benchmarks as well, since it's uberinteresting to see how both 64-bit OSes from MS and Apple compete. XP 32-bit is okay, but a bit boring.