Mac Pro Review

Mac Pro Product Information – Review & Buyer’s Guide

Overview

Mac Pro is the top of the range Macintosh, designed for professional usage in the most demanding applications such as graphic design, photo retouching, 3D modeling, video editing and the like. Mac Pro is designed to be the ultimate in performance and expandability so unless you need these then this Mac is probably overkill. Unlike previous top-end Macs the Mac Pro is designed to be upgraded easily. Top end Macs have always been upgradeable but you usually needed special tools and similar skills to a flat-pack furniture assembler in order to actually perform the upgrade. Not so with the Mac Pro, everything is designed to be easy to get at and it’s incredibly neat and tidy inside – not like the rat’s nest of tangled cables that used to lurk under the covers of previous Macs. It’s also very easy to connect peripherals with a profusion of USB, FireWire, optical, audio and Ethernet ports on the back and the front of the machine – no more crawling under the desk to reach fiddly sockets at the back for your most commonly used connectors!

Turning to the meat of the matter: what’s under the bonnet? The current Mac Pro uses the 64-bit Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Nehalem” processor which has it’s four cores on a single die. What does that mean? It means it’s fast. Very fast. As well as having very fast processors it also has the ability to boost it’s performance when it’s needed and switch off unused processors (thus saving energy) when it isn’t.

Features

• 8-core: Two 2.26GHz, 2.66GHz or 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors
• Quad-core: One 2.66GHz or 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3500 series processor
• Turbo Boost dynamic performance (up to 3.33GHz on 8-core 2.93GHz system)
• 8-core: Eight memory slots supporting up to 32GB using 1GB, 2GB or 4GB DIMMs
• Quad-core: Four memory slots supporting up to 8GB using 1GB or 2GB DIMMs
• Two independent 10/100/1000BASE-T Ethernet (RJ-45) interfaces with support for jumbo frames
• Optional AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi card with 802.11n
• Four 3.5-inch cable-free, direct-attach hard drive bays with  3Gb/s Serial ATA – up to 4TB of internal storage
• Three open full-length PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots

Opinion

Buying this machine is a simple decision: do you need all that power and or expandability or not? If you do then nothing else will do. Whilst additional performance is always welcome, it does come at a price and you won’t get the full benefit of that additional performance unless you are using demanding applications or are working in a production environment where minutes saved every hour add up to a big increase in productivity over a week. In short if you’re a graphic designer, 3D modeler, CAD designer, video editor or the like then this is without doubt the machine for you. If you’re just using it to write letters and surf the net, get an iMac instead. Expandability is the other key reason for choosing a Mac Pro, but in my experience, this expandability is not often used. If you look inside most 3 year old machines you will find that all those expansion slots are still empty, so make sure you’re not paying for something you’ll never use!

Buying a Mac Pro

The best place to buy a new Mac Pro is the online Apple Store. Not only do you have the comfort and security of buying directly from the manufacturer, you also get free delivery and 90 days free support from Apple.

The online Apple Store allows you to configure your Mac Pro to your own requirements: you can choose processor, display, memory, hard drive capacity and other options and build your own Mac. For the latest Mac Pro prices, configuration options and specifications visit the online Apple Store.

MacPro Quad-Core starts from £1,899

Mac Pro 8-Core starts from £2,499

Secondhand Mac Pro
If you’re interested in a secondhand Mac Pro instead of a new one check out the secondhand Mac Pros on MacBooty. This site finds the best deals on Mac Pros on eBay and saves you from having to sort through all the eBay listings yourself. You can also get previous models of Mac Pro that are no longer available from Apple, often at significant savings.