Apple's Mac Pro - Upgrading CPUs, Memory & Running XP
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2006 1:51 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Gaming Performance using Quake 4 & Half-Life 2 Episode 1
Our gaming performance analysis starts out with Quake 4 running at 1024x768 with High Quality visual settings. We used version 1.2 of Quake 4 and SMP was enabled:
As you can expect, with most games being great memory bandwidth/latency benchmarks at more CPU bound resolutions, the Mac Pro ends up being significantly slower than the Core 2 testbeds. The 12% performance advantage the X6800 holds here will shrink as the resolution increases, but the point here is to look at what sort of FB-DIMM penalty we'll be paying.
Next up we've got the recently released Half Life 2: Episode 1, running at default quality settings with the exception of AA and aniso being disabled. As with all of our gaming tests in this article we tested at 1024x768:
The story is no different under Half Life 2, but we did consistently see a drop in performance when going from two to four cores .
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Corlissmedia - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I've been reading through a lot of these sites that discuss upgrading a 2006 Mac Pro with dual dual-core 2.66's to dual quad-core x5355's. I'm thinking of doing this upgrade also, but in researching the cpus, I've found that none of them support ECC memory, and all Mac Pros, as far as I know, have ECC memory. So how does that work?????Spawn4ever - Tuesday, August 4, 2015 - link
I realize this is a very old post but i'm hopping someone, somewhere will still be willing to help me out. I own a great MacPro 2.1 2007 with the following specsModel Name: Mac Pro
Model Identifier: MacPro2,1
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 3 GHz
Number of Processors: 2
Total Number of Cores: 8
Memory: 32 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5780
I need to change the motherboard in order to install OS X 10.10 or change the system all together. The processors in this system are still quite fast to just get rid of them. Two questions:
1) Can i find motherboards today that will take these CPUs and work as a Hackintosh
2) Would you say that an Intel i7 series be faster than these almost 8 year old Xeons?
I primarily use this system for video editing and i'm starting to edit 4K footage which cannot be played back in real-time on this configuration.
Hope this post doesn't get lost in digital land and i hear back from someone at Anandtech or the internet world.
Thank you