Top Gun
The fervour around the Mac Pro continues and as people get access to the new systems, “real world”* benchmarks are beginning to spring up. With the exception of the second Geek Patrol post, most of the tests involve the 2.66GHz model in a standard configuration, which appear to have been first out of the door!
- Geek Patrol #1 - “Mac Pro Benchmarks”
- Geek Patrol #2 - “Mac Pro 3GHz Benchmarked”
- Macworld (US) - “2.66GHz Mac Pro sets the speed mark”
- MacInTouch - “Mac Pro: Preliminary Notes and Tests”
- Bare Feats - “SHOOTOUT: Mac Pro versus Quad G5”
The consensus on performance appears to be, as a lot of us expected, largely dictated by whether the software has been optimised for the Intel processor. When the stars are aligned (or your apps are Universal Binaries) the Mac Pro demonstrates some significant improvements. Ultimately the benefits you’ll gain from upgrading will depend on where you spend your time and which applications you use for specific tasks. This is why you’ll read a number of considered defences on why the G5 is not obsolete yet and while Apple may consider the transition to Intel “complete”, the actual transition amongst Mac users is a different matter altogether.
*Read “as opposed to Apple’s own” benchmarks.
1 Comments
You know what would be another real interesting test to run (and who knows maybe we’ll see it soon enough) do a MacPro vs HP Workstation (or Alienware). With the Intel chips in it and hell the ability to even run Windows on a Mac now, I’d love to see some of those kinds of tests. Sure they may have to be taken with a grain of salt for a variety of engineering reasons, but I’d still be curious to see it done.
cheers.