The Mac Pro overview, part 4: performance and final rating
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Aug 24, 2006 at 12:53pm
On Monday we started started our multi-part review/look at the Mac Pro, which was announced on Aug. 7. Tuesday we looked at the hard drives and memory upgrades, and yesterday we examined the video card options. Today we’ll look at the Mac Pro’s video card options and give it our final rating.
As I’ve mentioned whenever I do CPU reviews, I simply go by my “gut feeling” as to a system’s performance. The Mac Pro I’ve been test-driving is a standard configuration model, and feels wicked fast. I’ve had no problems or hiccups working with multiple apps open, even when one of those is DVD Player with a movie playing in a small screen. The standard video card works fine for most games, though I’m a casual, not hard core, gamer. For Universal Binary apps, the Mac Pro is definitely the fastest system I’ve ever used. And non-UB software such as Photoshop and Microsoft Office run at more-than-acceptable speeds.
But my “gut feelings” aren’t specific enough. So I’d recommend you check out the benchmarked specs at MacWorld, Bare Feat, Ars Technica and Mac vs. PC System Shootouts. Also, an HD Studio review says: “n tests conducted by Apple, encoding HDV 1080i format video on the 3Ghz version Mac Pro was 1.3 times faster than on the Power Mac G5 Quad. For standard definition DV, the comparison was 1.4 times faster.”
So what’s our final verdict? Overall, the Mac Pro is an excellent replacement for the Power Mac G5. It’s reasonable priced, incredibly expandable, surprisingly quiet and plenty powerful (especially for software optimized for Mactels). On the downside, AirPort and Bluetooth still aren’t built-in, the mouse and keyboard still haven’t been tweaked to aesthetically match the Mac Pro and pricing for memory upgrades and expansion is expensive.
If you need top tier performance and expansion options out the wazoo, the Mac Pro is the desktop for you. If you don’t have to have the fastest Mac, never add PCIe cards and don’t need a display bigger than a 20-incher, you should look into the Intel iMac, a gorgeous machine that packs plenty of power for most users in a compact, less expensive design.
Macsimum rating: 8.5 out of 10.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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