News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

August 21, 2006

hardware

Review : Mac Pro 3 GHz

Posted Aug. 21, ’06, 10:43 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Hardware

Our own Jimmy Galbraith, our loyal lab director, has been burning the midnight oil for most of last week getting the testing done of the latest Apple hardware. As the kids on the street around here would say, it’s hella fast.

But Jimmy tells us that it may not be worth the $800 difference:

Because processors represent just one piece of the performance puzzle, we found that the 3GHz machine posted an improvement over the 2.66GHz Mac Pro of about 5 to 6 percent on most tests, even though the 3GHz chips have a 13 percent faster clock speed. With all of our Mac Pro systems sporting the same drives, bus speeds, memory size, and graphics cards, only CPU-intensive tests like our Cinema 4D render times approached that 13 percent improvement. The 3GHz beat the 2.66GHz model in all tests, but usually just by a few seconds. That’s an important consideration for users contemplating paying the extra $800 above the 2.66GHz Mac Pro’s $2,499 asking price.


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