There’s a new beast in Apple’s desktop
Along with their new iMac lineup, and a new 27-inch LED Cinema Display, Apple has also power up their Mac Pro to the power of twelve. What’s kept is the sexy aluminum chassis which has proven to be successful. But the organs of the Mac Pro have been rather revamped with some seriously powerful nuclear reactor.
The Mac Pro now comes with to 12 processing cores, and what Apple claims to be up to 50 percent greater performance than the previous generation. Featuring the latest quad-core and 6-core Intel Xeon processors, new ATI graphics and the option for up to four units of 512GB solid state drives (SSD), the new Mac Pro continues to deliver astonishing performance and expandability to cope up with the harsh working environment for the most demanding consumers and professionals.
The 12 cores Mac Pro setup comes with a standard charge of $4,999, using dual-CPU setup from Intel’s 6-Core 3.33GHz Xeon server-class chips. The Xeon chips are able to boost their speeds up to 3.6GHz using Intel’s Turbo Boost technology. With the Hyper-Threading technology, you’ll have access to 24 virtual cores.
The Mac Pro package includes an ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics processor with 1GB of memory to compensate. Not much of a graphic champion, but many of Mac Pro users don’t really need powerful graphics processor as they mostly involves graphic rendering that uses processor power instead. Though, if you really need a champion to tag along your powerful rig, Apple will happily give you the option of an even faster ATI Radeon HD 5870 which also have 1GB of memory.
For the first time ever, Apple’s also throwing in the option to have SSD in your Mac Pro. Not one, not two, but up to four units of 512GB SSDs to cope with your speed demon. With the capability to connect up to four SSD drives in the system’s internal drive bays; the new Mac Pro can deliver ultra-high-speed disk bandwidth and random disk performance. Mac Pro also now features two Mini DisplayPorts and one dual-link DVI port, which will allow customers to link two LED Cinema Displays without an additional graphics card or adapter, and the dual-link DVI port, supports legacy DVI-based displays up to a resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels.
There are also two other packages if you don’t need such brutal beast. The new quad-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $2,499 (US) coming this August, which includes:
- one 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3530 processor with 8MB of fully-shared L3 cache;
- 3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 16GB;
- ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;
- two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI (dual-link) port (adapters sold separately);
- 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
- 18x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
- four PCI Express 2.0 slots;
- five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire® 800 ports;
- AirPort Extreme® 802.11n;
- Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and
- Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse.
The new 8-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $3,499 (US), includes:
- two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 processors with 12MB of fully-shared L3 cache per processor;
- 6GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
- ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;
- two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI (dual-link) port (adapters sold separately);
- 1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
- 18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
- four PCI Express 2.0 slots;
- five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports;
- AirPort Extreme 802.11n;
- Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and
- Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse.
