Professional designers, digital media hobbyists and those simply into great
design: meet your new lust object. Apples new Mac Pro (1,445.96 ex. VAT for the
base model) is a winner on multiple levels. From the outside, it looks great --
far more put together than any Windows-based box. Inside, it boasts powerful
specs, including two dual-core Intel Xeon processors, for a total of four
processing cores. And to top it off, its a great value. The only thing thats
missing, if anything, is a practical reason for a casual user to justify the
purchase; theres more computer here than youll need for day-to-day tasks. Some
users might miss the Apple Remote that made the Mac Mini and the iMac so
accessible as home-theatre PCs; and as always, Apples high-end desktop is not
intended for the gaming crowd. Photoshop performance also lags behind that of
comparable Windows-based PCs because Adobe still hasnt released an
Intel-friendly version for Mac OS X. Those few issues shouldnt surprise anyone,
however, and on balance, the Mac Pro more than makes up for them. If you need a
fast computer for digital media creation, the Mac Pro should be your first stop.
Design
No Windows-based PC can compare to the sheer economy and
innovation involved in the design of the Apple Mac Pro. The exterior is largely
unchanged from that of the Power
Mac G5, maintaining the same cheese grater appearance on the front and
rear panels and the same brushed aluminium on the sides, the top and the bottom.
Key differences on the Mac Pros front panel include an added optical-drive
slot, an extra USB 2.0 port and a FireWire 800 jack. The latter particularly
benefits designers who move their work between machines via external hard
drives, since the faster, easy-to-access FireWire 800 input can transmit data
quicker than USB 2.0 or standard FireWire 400.
The back panel of the Mac Pro also has a different layout
than that of the Power Mac G5, but the changes are more a function of the
internal design, which is one of the most exciting things about this system. The
Power Mac G5 impressed people with its clean interior. The Mac Pros internals
are better because theyre not simply clean -- they introduce new ideas about
how to best build a PC.
Our favourite feature of the Mac Pro is the hard drive
design. Too often, we see hard drives that block expansion bays, are hard to
remove or whose power and data cables dangle around the inside of a system like
a cheap party banner. Instead, Apple has mounted the hard drives in a row
directly under the optical drive cage and the power supply. Each drive attaches
to a numbered bracket (Apple calls them sleds) that slides into an
outward-facing bay. The brackets lock into place when you lift the
side-panel-removal tab on the rear of the Mac Pro, and the numbers on each
bracket tell you what bay the attached drive belongs to. The number system
prevents mixing up your boot drives with your data storage drives, but perhaps
the best part of this design is that you dont have to deal with any cables:
Apple has mounted all of the necessary connections directly in line with each
hard drive bay and out of the way of the rest of the system. The connections
line up perfectly with the hard drives and their brackets, and drives require
little-to-no force to remove and reinstall. The only caveat is that the drives
arent hot-swappable, meaning you cant take them out and put them back in when
the Mac Pro is powered on. However, hot-swapping is more a feature of a server,
and not something wed expect from a high-end desktop or most workstations.
The Mac Pro also has a new mechanism for adding and removing
system memory. Instead of requiring you to reach into the system and wade
through overhanging cables to get to the memory slots, the Mac Pro has two
removable circuit boards, each of which features four memory slots. These cards
fit a little more snugly than the hard drive brackets, but they require only
about as much pressure to reseat as a typical PC expansion card. This system
eliminates the need to lay the Mac Pro down on its side to swap memory in and
out, which is useful because you dont always have that much work space
available, particularly with a system of this size.
We have a minor beef with the removable memory trays, in
that they make the problem of installing the memory in the correct order a
little more complicated. Put your sticks in the wrong slots, and youll throttle
your memory bandwidth. The Mac Pros side panel has a diagram that attempts to
explain the proper order to use, but the instructions could be a little more
intuitive. Wed also wager that it wont occur to many users to realise that the
order makes a difference.
For further expansion, the Mac Pro comes with four x16 PCI
Express slots. The advantage here is that the x16 slots can accommodate all
types of PCI Express cards -- x16, x4 and x1. This doesnt mean that you can
double up on 3D graphics power the way Nvidias SLI and ATIs CrossFire
technologies allow on high-end gaming boxes, but what you can do is install four
graphics cards and output to up to eight different displays. That capability
could be of benefit to designers, desktop publishers, people in the finance
industry and anyone else who wants more screen space than a single display
affords.
The optical drive cage is a removable box in the upper-left
corner of the system into which you can fit up to two optical drives. Unlike
with the hard drives, you still need to wrangle with cables, but with the cage
in place theyre kept away from the rest of the system.
As for the CPUs, Apple has mounted a metal casing over them
thats not easy to remove. This doesnt invite making your own processor
upgrades, but the team at PowerMax
showed that the processor casing can be removed, proving that DIY CPU upgrades
are a possibility.
Features
Like Apples Power Macs before it, the Mac Pro is clearly
aimed at professionals. Its default £1,445.96 (ex. VAT, or £1,699 inc. VAT)
configuration, which is what we tested, features some average components,
including a single 250GB hard drive, a lone SuperDrive 16x DVD burner, and a
budget-level 256MB GeForce 7300 GT graphics card. Where itll start impressing
you is with its two 2.66GHz Intel Xeon processors and 1GB of high-end system
memory by way of two 512MB 667MHz DDR2 ECC SDRAM modules. ECC, or
error-correcting code, is a feature of server-class memory designed to ensure
stability. It makes plenty of sense to include ECC memory in a
professional-level desktop, but its overkill for everyday use or even for
gamers.
