8-core Apple Mac Pro: Review and Specs

Macworld 2009 was a disappointment for those of you who were waiting for a Nehalem Xeon Mac Pro, but the wait is now over as the first 8-core Apple Mac is finally here. It is great to see that Apple have finally seen sense and given users what they want, and that is dual-socket boards with eight cores, hyper-threading and a faster FSB.

That is the good news; the bad news is that not everyone will be able to afford this latest upgrade, but then again not every user will need to have this kind of upgrade. Ars Technica have been looking at what kind of user will need to use this high-end machine.

The review that Ars Technica has written is extensive and certainly goes into great detail. The review did not get off to a great start and was put back a week as the first machine they received was bad and crashed a number of time. This is not a common occurrence, and there seems to be no such problem with other 8-core Apple Mac Pro 2009. For a full review visit: Ars Technica

Specs of the review units:

• 8-core Nehalem Xeon Mac Pro 2.66 GHz
• AMD Radeon 4870/Nvidia Quadro FX 5600 test configs
• 12GB RAM/14GB RAM test configs
• Mac OS X 10.5.6
• 8-core Penryn Xeon Mac Pro 2.8 GHz (early 2008)
• Nvidia Quadro FX 5600/Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT test configs
• 14 GB RAM
• Mac OS X 10.5.6