    
Monster©
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Username: Monster
Post Number: 4445
Registered: 7-2002
| | Posted on Friday, August 11, 2006 - 2:56 am: | 
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The standard configuration of the Mac Pro outperforms its PowerPC-based G5 predecessors by a wide margin, helping to justify Apple’s 2005 decision to switch to processors 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, tallying a Speedmark 4.5 score of 299 in Macworld Lab 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 don’t yet run natively on Intel chips. That means the Mac Pro was able to improve upon the Speedmark score of the Power Mac G5 Quad by 14 percent, even though the collection of tests that comprises Speedmark includes several which require Apple’s Rosetta code-translation technology.
Apple unveiled the Mac Pro at this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Using two dual-core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors, the new Mac Pro comes in just one standard configuration, although Apple lets you configure everything from the processor speed to the installed RAM to the graphics card to the number of hard drives and optical drives 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 test them as they arrive. The first machine to come in was the standard configuration—the $2,499 Dual-Core Mac Pro with two 2.66GHz Xeon processors, 1GB of Fully-Buffered DDR2 RAM, a 250GB hard drive, a 16X SuperDrive with double-layer support, and an Nvidia GeForce 7300GT graphics card. This out-of-the-box Mac Pro configuration earned the highest Speedmark score ever recorded in our tests....
http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/macprobench/index.php
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