Apple has brought forth a very stylish and attractive notebook......known as the Mac Pro.It is designed just for the purpose of students and music...It is very affordable and in one's budget.It has also brought a choice of Quad Core and 8 Core..
Hardware Design
The Mac Pro comes well equipped with a fast 250-GB SATA hard drive, a decent nVidia GeForce 7300 GT graphics card with two DVI ports (one capable of driving the 30" Cinema Display), 1 GB of RAM with six free RAM slots (capable of handling 16 GB!), three free hard drive bays and a free optical drive bay in addition to the bay holding a dual-layer SuperDrive. The computer's enclosure is a marvel of accessibility – installing extra drives or RAM could hardly be easier.
The Mac Pro has fewer fans than its G5 predecessor and needs no fancy liquid cooling system. The air flowing out the back of our Mac Pro was cooler than that of the dual G5 next to it.
With the Mac Pro, Apple continues its recent emphasis on design continuity. Rather than a radical case redesign – as for the Power Mac G4 and G5 models and each generation of iMac and PowerBook – the Mac Pro's case is barely distinguishable from the G5's. The front has a second optical drive slot and welcome second USB and FireWire 800 ports. The back changed a little – fewer fan openings, and no dedicated AirPort/Bluetooth antenna panel. (We're not sure where the antenna is, and the standard model we purchased lacks wireless capabilities.)
Internal design is another story entirely. The Mac Pro improves hugely on the Power Mac G5's design, which was a very good starting point. The Xeons run cooler than the G5, so less of the case needs to be dedicated to keeping them cool. This frees up more space for useful purposes – extra drive bays and memory expansion. The Mac Pro has four SATA drive bays, and each one comes with a slide-out drive carrier, complete with gorgeous, high quality screws already in place for you to use. Adding a drive is as simple as sliding out a carrier, screwing the drive to it, then sliding it back in. Done. No cables involved. Optical drives are almost as simple – slide out the optical drive carrier, screw in the drive, connect the ATA and power cables, slide back in. (Don't forget to remove the optical drive tray's front panel, or it won't make it through the case opening!)
Apple offers the ordering option of adding a second SuperDrive, using the Mac Pro's spare optical drive bay. Mac users have been asking for a second drive bay ever since its disappearance with the demise of the "wind tunnel" G4; their wish has now been granted. For the moment, we're leaving our extra bay empty, anticipating the release of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray data drives in the next year or so.
We've already mentioned the Mac Pro's four SATA hard drive bays. In addition, there seem to be two unused SATA sockets on the logic board. Did Apple hope to have six bays? Are they for future expansion? We don't know, but some MacInTouch readers have already proposed using these to bridge to external SATA ("eSATA") drive enclosures. It might also be possible to put an extra hard drive in the spare optical drive bay, with an appropriate adapter tray (cheaply available at any PC repair shop).
With all four SATA drive bays filled, our Mac Pro puts a bit more air out the back, but it isn't noticeably louder. Sound damping is excellent; two Hitachi Deskstars we added don't add to the ambient noise except for seek sounds when they're very active (which helps you hear how the system is operating).
The Mac Pro's RAM lives on riser cards adjacent to the processors and PCI Express slots. Adding RAM is similarly simple – pull the riser card, add FB-DIMMs, slide back in. Even the PCI cards are easy to manage, with captive thumbscrews – no more dropping them into the bottom of the case and trying to fish them out.
The power supply appears to be an entirely new design, which may be a good thing, considering the number of spectacular power supply failures in recent G5 Power Macs. Instead of being buried in the bottom of the Power Mac, inaccessible without a complete disassembly, the Mac Pro's power supply is at the top rear of the computer, behind its optical drives and above its hard drives and all the circuitry. Several power cables snake out the back of the power supply to various components. Air exiting the power supply felt relatively cool, but slightly warmer than that of the dual G5 2.0 GHz sitting next to it.
The power cord uses a standard connector at the power supply, unlike the G5's custom socket. The cord is thinner and lighter than the G5's super-duty cord, from which we conclude Apple doesn't expect the Mac Pro to draw as much power.
All in all, the Mac Pro's internals are as well thought out and functional as an expensive server's, but with striking attention to aesthetic detail. Every corner is curved and smoothed and carefully aligned with its neighbor. Every piece of sheet metal is satin-finished; every edge is radiused. Even the screws are beautiful and precisely formed. The contrast couldn't be greater with a Dell 9150 we tested, which is functional and sort of accessible inside, but all sharp edges and awkward angles. The Mac Pro is a thing of beauty, inside and out – a technological work of art.
Xeon Inside
The Xeon line of processors is designed for workstations and servers. "Workstation" is industry jargon for very fast, expensive computers dedicated to a single user's tasks – and, historically, the Xeon has been both fast and expensive.
The Mac Pro is actually surprisingly cheap as Xeon-based computers go, but it requires special FB-DIMM memory that costs twice as much as the standard types of RAM used in the iMac Core Duo and MacBooks – and not many memory vendors carry these FB-DIMMs yet. Apple itself has a several-week backlog of orders, and retail Apple Stores had no idea when they would get any stock. None of the local computer stores we checked stocked FB-DIMMs, although some Internet vendors are starting to carry them. So, it takes a bit of effort right now to load up a Mac Pro's memory slots.
These slots are on riser cards mounted perpendicular to the main logic board. This puts them directly behind the CPUs in the flow of air through the enclosure, and the FB-DIMMs have their own heatsinks. Heatsinks on the memory are not strictly required, but the fans will have to spin faster to move more air to achieve the same cooling without them. Effectively, the memory heatsinks' function is to help keep the Mac Pro quiet!
In this sophisticated new memory, designed for higher performance, each memory module has its own on-board controller circuitry (contributing to the cost). The Mac Pro's FB-DIMM memory is error correcting, which we hope will reduce the plague of problems, such as kernel panics and freezes, that customers have experienced in recent years with imperfect Mac memory. The Mac Pro also has a 256-bit wide bus, twice that of the Power Mac G5. The FB-DIMMs must be installed in pairs, and additional performance gains are said to be gained from using matched sets of four FB-DIMMs, but we haven't been able to get extra memory yet to test this. (Matched memory gains in other Macs have been minor to modest in scope.)
Each Xeon chip also has a whopping 4 MB of Level 2 cache, shared between its two cores. The dual-core G5 demonstrated that shared cache need not have a speed penalty compared to dedicated caches. Intel goes a step further, and either core can use the entire 4 MB cache if the other core is idle, which is useful for speeding up single-threaded application code.
The Xeon offers "enhanced" SSE3 vector instructions. We're told that SSE3 is potentially faster than the PowerPC G4/G5 Altivec "Velocity Engine", but in practice, the G5 still appears to have a real edge in vector-optimized code.
Expansion
Like the latest G5s, the Mac Pro supports PCI Express ("PCIe") expansion cards – not to be confused with Power Macs' PCI-X and plain PCI cards, which are completely incompatible with the new standard, first introduced on the dual-core G5 "quad" model (and its dual-core 2.0 and 2.3GHz G5 siblings).
The bottom slot is an "x16" (8 gigabytes per second of data throughput) "double-wide" slot intended for video cards with oversize cooling fans. Of the remaining three slots, two are x4 and the last is x1. In terms of bandwidth, this means 2 GBps and 500 MBps, respectively. HD video editors and others who need massive bandwidth must take careful note of which slots are the fast slots when adding cards.
There are somewhat arcane limits on power consumption by PCI Express cards to note, and Apple recommends against using "high power cards using auxiliary power" in the two x4 slots. (The Mac Pro may help keep Apple consultants in business – PCI voodoo is back!)
The importance of the Mac Pro's four SATA hard drive bays should not be underestimated. For a small additional investment, customers can configure a fast RAID0 array (or even two RAIDs!) with Disk Utility, or add a dedicated scratch drive to speed up Photoshop – all running at maximum SATA II speeds (which seem to be faster, generally, than parallel ATA).
Neither FireWire 800 nor external SATA can offer this kind of performance and reliability. FireWire 800 is pretty fast, but internal Mac Pro RAID0 pairs should be substantially faster. And the internal power supply should be more reliable (hopefully!) than external power adapters hooked up to FireWire enclosures, with all their attendant cables and connectors.
External SATA PCIe and PCI cards in the G5 have performed worse than FireWire 800 in our limited testing, so the Mac Pro's internal SATA looks like the best game in town for top performance (short of some expensive, specialized SCSI or Fibre Channel system). We think that these four bays (with their SATA II support) offer a major advantage over the Power Mac's two drive bay limit.
Video
The Mac Pro's standard display card is a GeForce 7300 GT. This is an entry-level card, designed by nVidia for undemanding users of older games and basic multimedia. Walk into CompUSA or Best Buy and you can find it for about $80. Tom's Hardware, in their Summer 2006 GeForce round-up review, declined to review the 7300, "as we do not consider it a gaming card." Tom's reviewer Darren Polkawski notes, "We feel that these cards are best suited for an entry level gaming system for older titles ... or a home theater PC."
The GeForce 7300 GT is adequate for Mac gaming. Doom 3, in play, ran a consistent 60fps at 1024x768 resolution. (Doom 3's framerate is capped at 60, except when testing). At 1280x1024, Doom frequently dropped to 30fps, sometimes even to 20. This isn't spectacular, but it's acceptable – apart for the awful horizontal "tearing" we experienced as we played at any resolution! It was very distracting and made play feel jerky, even when the reported frame rate was very high. We set Doom 3 to match vertical sync, which should eliminate this, but didn't. Either the driver or the card has a problem; either way, this shouldn't have gone out the door.
Halo, which runs in Rosetta, also experienced tearing, though nowhere near as bad as Doom 3's. At moderate resolution (800x600), Halo performed similarly on the Mac Pro and our test G5 with the old GeForce 6600LE card. At 1680x1050 (the size of Apple's 20" Studio Display and 20" iMacs), the Mac Pro actually managed to maintain a playable framerate while the G5 could not – but the tearing became far more noticeable.
Halo's graphics engine is now well over four years old, so it's not exactly a demanding title by today's game standards. The graphics card does the heavy lifting here, and it's definitely up to running older games like Halo, even with Rosetta's code-translation penalty.
The GeForce 7300 GT has two DVI ports, one of which is "dual-link" and capable of driving Apple's enormous 30" display. The other port is not. There is nothing on the back to tell you which is which, although they are numbered "1" and "2". Presumably, port number one is the high-bandwidth dual-link one for the big displays – but the total lack of differentiation or explanation is decidedly un-Apple.
Apple offers two CTO (configure to order) upgrade options, the highly rated ATI Radeon X1900XT, and the nVidia Quadro FX 4500. The X1900 family is ATI's latest, highest performing gaming-oriented hardware; it gets consistently excellent reviews in the PC world. The Quadro FX 4500 is nVidia's workstation card, intended for 3D visualization tools and modeling; it is the reigning champion of workstation OpenGL cards.
The GeForce 7300 GT is adequate for casual gaming, but anyone serious about their gaming should immediately pony up for one of Apple's display card upgrades. At least with the GeForce's new Intel Mac drivers, Mac games finally get graphics of the same quality enjoyed by PCs several years ago.
The extra PCIe slots make it possible to add more video cards for multi-display setups. Unfortunately, only one is an x16 ("16-lane", in Apple parlance) slot, so anyone looking to pair up SLI video cards for ultimate gaming performance will have to stick with PCs, which have had this capability for years. (The 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards actually had this capability on Macs, back in the late 90's, but it hasn't been seen on Mac since 3dfx folded.)
For reasons Apple hasn't explained, you can't mix-and-match ATI and nVidia cards in the Mac Pro. We haven't yet tried installing both kinds to see if they'll make the magic smoke escape.
We're curious to see if retail, non-Mac specific ATI and nVidia video cards will work on Mac Pros with Apple's built-in Mac OS X drivers. For years, Mac users have been limited to over-priced, under-powered video cards. Is this about to change?
Performance
The Core Duo, used in the iMac and MacBooks, has outstanding "integer" performance, which is a large component of its impressive overall performance, but the G5 had a substantial edge with outstanding memory performance over the Core Duo. The Mac Pro has now closed that gap with its high speed FB-DIMM memory, and most of our tests of native code (not Rosetta applications such as Photoshop), showed the Mac Pro to be the fastest Mac around.
Our separate Mac Pro Benchmarks page has all the details of our benchmark tests and performance analysis.
In general, Universal Binary applications just fly on the Mac Pro. The experience is fast and fluid – a hallmark of multiprocessor machines with multithreaded applications, but like the Quad G5 before it, the quad Xeon cores in the Mac Pro really enhance this effect.
We really had to work hard to make the Mac Pro break a sweat. Massive Photoshop files could slow it down, but once we gave it a fast RAID scratch disk, it got within striking distance of native G5 speeds. Aperture eats anything we can throw at it, but this computer has shown few bottlenecks, so far. We expect that giving it plenty of RAM and very fast disks will be very rewarding.
One exception is gaming. The Mac Pro lags far behind Windows PCs, turning in Doom3 timedemo frame rates half that of PCs running the same video hardware and slower processors.
A remaining question is the Mac Pro's performance with PCI Express hard drive adapter cards. We have been very disappointed by the performance of SATA cards on both PCI and PCI Express G5 Power Macs, as have some MacInTouch readers, and we hope this bottleneck is addressed in the Mac Pro, along with the poor USB 2.0 performance of previous Macs. Testing continues.
Software
iLife '06 is included with the Mac Pro, along with the excellent OmniOutliner 3.5, but precious little else. Intuit's QuickBooks used to be included on pro Macs, too, but is no longer present. Apple used to include excellent creative-oriented utilities such as Art Director's Toolkit and SnapzPro X with pro Macs; we definitely miss their presence on Mac Pro, as well as AppleWorks.
As with other Intel Macs, no "Classic" Mac application can run on the Mac Pro, nor does Virtual PC. Parallels Desktop for Mac causes a kernel panic, but the developers are working on a fix for this.
We haven't yet tested Boot Camp. Apple hasn't finished preparing all the drivers for Windows XP yet, but field reports indicate that most can be gathered on the Internet from the original suppliers and work reasonably well.
MacInTouch readers have asked if the Mac Pro would make a good Windows Photoshop workstation using Parallels. Since Parallels currently causes a kernel panic on Mac Pros, we can't really test this, and, since Parallels can only expose one CPU to the virtual machine, it's safe to predict that Win/Photoshop in Parallels will lag both native Windows and native Mac performance. Those who need the ultimate Photoshop platform today will be best served by a Quad G5 or a quad-core PC running Windows.
Thanks for reading...!!!
