The quad-core
Apple Mac Pro has set new milestone in the UK's first independent speed test of the latest Intel-based Mac. A test performed by The
PC Pro magazine showed these amazing results.
In the intensive test, Apple’s pre-installed Mac
OS X was replaced with
Windows XP Professional using Apple’s Boot Camp Beta. During the test a demanding task was run in
Microsoft Office,
Photoshop and a music decoder. All the applications were kept busy and used the machines resources.
The Apple machine showed outstanding results in terms of speed and performance. PC Pro tested the machine with multiple-applications running simultaneously and testing the performance of the machine.
The results showed that the machine was almost three times faster than the reference
Pentium D-based computer that PC Pro's labs test scores are based on.
Apple’s Mac Pro is fitted with the top-end
workstation oriented Xeon CPU. This makes the machine as a quad-core machine fabulously fast for CPU-intensive tasks, as long as the application in question is able to use them all.
There is a top-level specification for 3GHz Xeon 5160 processors: 4GB
RAM, a Quadro FX4500 workstation graphics card and 1.75TB of
storage, and will cost approximately £5,000.
However, a base specification has sporting dual 2.66GHz Xeons, 1GB RAM and GeForce 7300 graphics, and will cost £1,699 inc VAT, according to PC Pro.