Apple Mac Pro Preview
Anandtech has previewed the all new Mac Pro Workstation based on Intel Xeon processors and Anandtech has elaborately explained about the technical specifications of the Mac Pro.
Anandtech Preview on Mac Pro
In many ways, the fact that Apple didn’t change the exterior of the PowerMac G5 chassis symbolizes the upgrade that is the Mac Pro. The focus is entirely on the inside of the chassis, on the Woodcrest based Xeon processors, the FB-DIMMs and the four SATA drive bays, however we’d caution you on spending too much on a brand new Mac Pro right away, despite Apple boasting immediate availability. By the end of this year, Intel will begin shipping Clovertown, which should be a drop-in quad-core replacement to the current dual-core Woodcrest based Xeon CPUs. It should allow Apple to replace its dual 3GHz Xeon 5160 option with a pair of quad-core Clovertown based Xeon CPUs. We’re not yet sure what the clock speeds or price points will be, but it may be worth waiting for if you can. If you can’t wait, there is always the possibility that you may be able to simply upgrade the CPUs in the Mac Pro later on, in which case you may want to go with the lowest end option now and simply drop in Clovertown later. Over the coming days we will hopefully be able to figure out what will and won’t be possible with the new Mac Pro design, but we’re hoping that the move to Intel means good things for the cost of upgradability on these systems.
On the technology side, we wanted to see a bit more from Apple. For a company usually on the forefront of adopting new technologies and standards we were surprised not to see any eSATA ports on the Mac Pro. Given that OS X’s GUI performance is sometimes tied to the amount of video memory you have, we would also have expected Apple to opt for one of the 512MB GeForce 7300s as an option on the Mac Pro, although admittedly 256MB is pretty good even at 30″ Cinema Display resolutions. We thought we might see more of a focus on RAID, especially with the default system configuration, but alas a 250GB hard drive is all you get.
Going by Anandtech’s preview I feel Apple should have considered giving atleast 500GB hard disk with Mac Pro and minimum of 2GB of RAM.
What do you think Apple should have done?
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I do think Anand misses a very important point though: the Mac Pro is actually priced significantly cheaper than similar spec’ed dells. HPs, etc.
Of course there will always be things that can be improved, but for price you really get a great machine. I would have liked to see a few more grapohics card options and a RAID option, but I don’t think the “base” machine could be any cheaper or higher spec’ed for the price.
Hello Rob welcome to my Blog…
Well I would really like to see a 500GB hard disk as 250GB will be too small for an workstation. Usually people use workstation for high end uses like 3D designs which gobble of GB’s of space. Going by today’s power hungry applications 1GB of ram is not at all enough. I have around 2GB of ram for my existing desktop. So Apple should definitely consider upgrading these specifications