With the four drive bays, extra firewire and USB ports, a bay for a second optical drive (or even more hard drives?) and the ability to natively run Windows on top of two very fast dual core processors – these machines get a big solid tick of approval with hearty handshake and slap on the bum thrown in for good measure.

If you’re running universal binary apps (Final Cut Pro 5, iMovie etc) then the Mac Pros hoon!
If you’re running PowerPC apps (Adobe CS suite) then expect roughly the same performance as a Quad G5 from the Quad Intel 2.66GHz and about a 35% increase from the Quad Intel 3GHz beast.

According to GeekPatrol the Quad 3GHz Intel Mac Pro is 35% faster than the Quad 2.5Ghz PPC G5. Their tests showed the Quad 2.66GHz Mac Pro to be 7% faster than the Quad 2.5Ghz G5. However this test used only two RAM modules in the Mac Pro and so is probably wrong. See below for explanation.

It is important to note that you will get dramatic speed improvements by striping (RAID 0) discs and these new Mac Pros make that very easy – no need to install expensive hardware RAID cards – just use the available bays.

RAM
The Mac Pro supports up to 16GB of 667Mhz DDR2 fully buffered ECC RAM in 8 FB-DIMM (Fat Bastard) slots.
VIP Note: with 1Gb of RAM the MacPro has a 128bit memory bus, with 4 sticks of RAM your Mac Pro will hoon along utilising 256bit memory bus…get four FB sticks!

Video Cards and PCI Express (PCIe) Slots
For your Mac Pro, you have the following 16X PCI Express (PCIe) graphics card options:
The GeForce 7300 GT (16X, 256MB, dual-link DVI + single-link DVI port) is standard.
However, we recommend the Radeon X1900 XT (16X, 512MB, two dual-link DVI ports) as a CTO option ($560). It’s much faster than the GeForce 7300 GT and just a hair slower than the more expensive ($2700) Quadro FX 4500.
Note that the delivery date for the Radeon X1900 XT is to be determined…

There is one important “gotcha” – the PCI Express bus dynamically allocates a maximum of 26 lanes between the four slots. This means that if you have a 16x speed graphics card and then install one 8x and another 4x speed card, the 16x graphics card will actually run at 8x speed.

The bandwidth of the four PCI Express slots can be reconfigured using the Configuration Expansion Slot Utility (who’d a thunk it) which is located on your Mac Pro at: /System/Library/CoreServices/.

One nice touch by Apple: The Mac Pro’s “thick” high-end graphics cards don’t encroach on the adjacent PCIe slot. They use a “double wide” 16 lane slot for the graphics card so you can use all three of the remaining slots.

Hard Drives and RAID
The Mac Pro has four built-in drive bays run by a SATA II controller at 3 Gb/s.
Since the biggest single drive at the moment is the Seagate 750GB you’d assume that you can therefore put four 750GB drives in, stripe them (RAID 0) and you’d get 3 terrabytes of super fast space (2.7TB formatted). This does not seem to be the case. For reasons that they can’t determine as yet, four seagate 750GB drives RAIDed in the Mac Pro just doesn’t work. Three RAIDed seagate 750’s work fine and will get you sustained read speeds of 222MB/s and write speeds of 223MB/s – more than enough for HD DV capture. Three seagate 750’s will give you approx 1.9TB of space.

For non video production workstations we’re recommending two 500GB drives at time of purchase. We can then set them up as a mirror (RAID 1) so that you always have a backup. If you want speed and redundancy, we can install 4 drives, stripe 2 of them as your data volume and then mirror that onto the other two striped drives (RAID 0+1). Then you have the speed of two drives and a backup as well!

As always please email service at coretech <.> net <.> au for quotes and queries.