Upgrading and Analyzing Apple's Nehalem Mac Pro
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 13, 2009 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
The Alternative: SSD in an Older Mac Pro?
I hate to sound like a broken record but I can’t stress the upside to having a SSD in any machine, especially the Mac Pro. I’ll give you my history with the Mac Pro before diving into some of the details on what a fast SSD will do for one of these systems.
One thing I always appreciated about OS X was that it seemed to keep things in memory in a more intelligent way than Windows ever did. I could leave most applications active and I was rarely bogged down by the inexplainable disk crunching that I got in Windows. Because of this I always outfitted my Macs with as much memory as possible. My Mac Pro started with 2GB, then 4GB then 8GB. For the most part the machine remained nice and snappy, but over time it lost that fresh-out-of-the-box feeling. Applications didn’t launch quite as snappily, not to mention how painful it was to launch anything immediately upon reaching the desktop.
Admittedly my Mac Pro lasted longer before I started to feel that it was slow than any PC I’d used up to that point, but it eventually got to where I was frustrated. That’s when I turned to an SSD to solve my problems.
You can read about the history behind SSDs in my Mac Pro here, but eventually I ended up with an Intel X25-M in the system.
Now Apple won’t ship a X25-M or any Intel SSD in its systems. The reasoning isn’t public, but it’s not exactly a technical limitation or performance issue. The why doesn’t really matter, because the drive works just fine in any Mac Pro, whether the original one from 2006 or the newest model from 2009. You have to come up with a clever way to mount the drive in the system, but assuming you’re good with metal (or rubber bands) you’ll find a way to get the drive in there.
The benefits of using the X25-M in a Mac Pro are just like that of any system: huge. Allow me to make my point.
One of my benchmarks for this review is a test that developers will appreciate. I use the latest version of Apple’s Xcode tools to compile the Adium project and I time the build. This particular test is quite CPU intensive, it will actually tax all 16 threads on a dual-socket Nehalem Mac Pro. The CPUs don’t stay at 100% for the entire time, but there are periods when they do.
The graph below shows you the build time on three systems, the original Mac Pro running at 3.0GHz (in both four and eight core varieties) and the new eight-core Nehalem Mac Pro running at 2.26GHz:
Parallel processing to the rescue. Despite the significant reduction in clock speed, Hyper Threading gives the new Mac Pro an advantage in build time. The Nehalem system completed the test in 19% less time than the old 8-core Mac Pro.
Now both of these machines used the drive that comes with the new Mac Pro. It’s a 7200RPM 640GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 SATA hard drive. By no means a slouch. Now let’s look at what happens if we throw an Intel X25-M into the old Mac Pro:
Ah ha! Remember that I mentioned the Adium compile test isn’t entirely CPU bound. Well, when the benchmark isn’t taxing all cores it is bottlenecked by IO; it’s accessing the disk. Simply putting a SSD in the old Mac Pro makes it as fast as the new one with its stock hard drive. Now if you combine the new Mac Pro with a SSD, you get an even faster system - it’ll complete the same test in 87 seconds.
So adding a SSD to an older Mac Pro can breathe new life into it, and in some cases make it faster than a new Mac Pro with a standard hard drive. But let’s look at this another way. Is Apple doing the new Mac Pro a disservice by not putting a SSD in it as a boot/applications drive?
The table below shows the performance improvement from the old Mac Pro to the new Mac Pro using a HDD and using a SSD. I'm simply comparing how long it takes to build the Adium application using Xcode on my old Mac Pro vs the new one using a HDD and then using an Intel X25-M SSD:
| Xcode Adium Build Test | Stock HDD | Intel X25-M SSD |
| 8-core Mac Pro 2006/2007 3.0GHz (Clovertown) | 139.5s | 113.0s |
| 8-core Mac Pro 2009 2.26GHz (Nehalem) | 112.7s | 87.0s |
| % Increase in Performance | 23.7% | 29.9% |
With a standard 7200RPM hard drive, the new Nehalem Mac Pro is nearly 24% faster than the original 8-core Mac Pro. However, swap in Intel’s X25-M and the new Mac Pro is almost 30% faster.
In other words, with a faster IO subsystem the Nehalem Mac Pro is able to outperform its predecessor by a wider margin. Or to answer my loaded question from above: yes, Apple is limiting the performance of its latest Mac Pro by not outfitting it with a high performance SSD.
The explanation is simple. Nehalem is more data hungry than any previous generation Intel microprocessor. It can operate on twice as many threads as Penryn and Conroe and it has much deeper buffers internally. To fill them with instructions it needs fast access to memory, which it has. Unfortunately not everything you ask of it is already in memory, and that’s where the burden gets pushed down to the hard drive. Speed up the hard drive and you’ll help Nehalem shine.
What’s the practical recommendation? If you need more processing power, the new Mac Pro will give it to you. Here’s another test where switching to a SSD does absolutely nothing:
Not all applications are going to be as sensitive to random IO latency as building a large project in Xcode. But I will stress this, it’s ridiculous for any OEM today to be selling a machine costing over $3000 without outfitting it with an SSD.
The table below shows application launch times for the two Mac Pro configurations I’ve been using with and without an SSD:
| Xcode Adium Build Test | Mac Pro 2006 (3.0GHz) - HDD | Mac Pro 2006 (3.0GHz) - SSD | Mac Pro 2009 (2.26GHz) - HDD | Mac Pro 2009 (2.26GHz) - SSD |
| Adobe Photoshop CS4 | 7.4s | 3.2s | 7.9s | 3.3s |
| Adobe Premier CS4 | 28.1s | 15.7s | 28.7s | 17.0s |
| Microsoft Office 2008 (Word, Excel & PowerPoint) | 13.0s | 4.7s | 13.3s | 5.1s |
If you’ve never seen a table of what a good SSD can do for application launch times, the one above is just as good as any. And yes, the third test in the table is launching all three applications at the same time.
Let’s look at what’s happening here. Both my old eight-core Mac Pro and the new eight-core Nehalem Mac Pro launch these applications in about the same amount of time. The older system is slightly faster simply because of its higher clock speed. Launching an application is generally not very CPU intensive and definitely doesn’t consist of many high CPU use threads, so there’s no benefit from Hyper Threading here. Now if you launched 20 or 30 applications at the same time we’d be telling a different story, but firing up a single app is going to be mostly a product of ILP and clock speed, the combination of the two is going to favor the older Mac Pro in this case thanks to the higher clock speed.
The launch times aren’t very impressive regardless of which system you look at. Premier takes nearly 30 seconds to load. Blech. But now look at what the X25-M does for both systems. Basically cut the time it takes to launch an application in half and that’s what a good SSD will do for you.
Application launch time is one of those things that helps contribute to how snappy a system feels and if you want to make your system feel faster, you'll need an SSD.
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rpmurray - Saturday, July 18, 2009 - link
Awesome!!!Please point me to the webpage where I can spec out a system.
BoboGO - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors!12GB (6 x 2GB) DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) memory
1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s hard drive
250GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid state disk (SSD)
22X DVD/CD double-layer writer with LightScribe support
8X Blu-Ray DVD Burner
X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series 7.1 Channels PCI-Express Sound Card
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 with 2GB GDDR3 memory
Thermaltake Xaser VI Black Aluminum Computer Case
Piano-black 22" 2ms HDMI Widescreen w/LED Backlight LCD Monitor - w/webcam & speakers
Bonus! Virtual 7.1 Surround Sound Light Weight Circumaural USB Gaming Headset
Ships: 3 days
Total Cost: $6,073.92
ddobrigk - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Here's my take on this:http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-262853_10...">http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-262853_10...
Can't remember the exact price in USD, but it was around US$6000 too. And that's with a very-high-end cooling solution.
Tesselator - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
I'm not sure what the author or others here are talking about when they say Apple's extremely outrageous prices are due to Intel's price hike. There is no price hike. There was no price hike. Either the author is misinformed or it's a straw-man technique being employed in order to justify and excuse Apple having gone off the deep end with their price scheduling. With so many of the comparisons in this article omitting the 2008 Mac Pro models all together and only comparing the 2009 to the 2006, I'm to believe the later.Here are the prices of the respective chips at the time the respective Mac Pro machines were released:
2008 Models:
1 x 2.80GHz E5462 Harpertown: $797 ($2299 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 2.80GHz E5462 Harpertown: $797 x 2 = $1594 ($2699 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 3.00GHz X5472 Harptertown: $958 x 2 = $1914 ($3599 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 3.20GHz X5482 Harpertown: $1279 x 2 = $2558 ($4399 overall Mac Pro price)
2009 Models:
1 x 2.66GHz W3520 Bloomfield: $284 ($2499 overall Mac Pro price)
1 x 2.93GHz W3540 Bloomfield: $562 ($2999 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 2.26GHz E5520 Gainestown: $373 x 2 = $746 ($3299 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 2.66GHz X5550 Gainestown: $958 x 2 = $1916 ($4699 overall Mac Pro price)
2 x 2.93GHz X5570 Gainestown: $1386 x 2 = $2772 ($5899 overall Mac Pro price)
As you can see, there is no significant price hike and in fact Intel has provided a massive price REDUCTION in offering the Bloomfield line. This delivers a second more severe slap in the face from Apple to it's user base.
Just look at this price scheduling:
2006
Mac Pro Quad 2.0GHz $2,199 NEW
Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz $2,499 NEW
Mac Pro Quad 3.0GHz $3,299 NEW
2007
Mac Pro Quad 2.0GHz $2,199
Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz $2,499
Mac Pro Quad 3.0GHz $3,299
Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz $3,997 NEW
2008
Mac Pro Quad 2.8GHz (2008) $2,299 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 2.8GHz (2008) $2,799 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 3.0GHz (2008) $3,599 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 3.2GHz (2008) $4,399 NEW
2009
Mac Pro Quad 2.66GHz $2,499 NEW
Mac Pro Quad 2.93GHz $2,999 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 2.26GHz $3,299 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 2.66GHz $4,699 NEW
Mac Pro 8-core 2.93GHz $5,899 NEW
That's a $1,000 to $2,000 price hike on Apple's part and the first of it's kind in the past 10 as I've researched it. It might be due to poor sales or future economic projections, I have no idea. But it's unprecedented and completely unjustified by looking at part prices and other offerings in the industry.
I recently priced a DIY build and I could assemble a system with 18 DIMM slots, 6 PCIe slots, 36GB RAM, two quad-core 3.2GHz Nehalem, typical drives, cards, and case go for well under $5k. Apple wants $6K for much much less.
Something isn't right in Denmark!
winterspan - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Thank you for posting this. I'm a frequent reader of Macrumors.com forums, and I actually made a similar chart showing the very similar launch prices of Xeon 5400/5500 when new and how the massive $1000+ increase in price of the new Mac Pros are totally unjustified and ridiculous.
It would still be overpriced, but a far better deal if they tossed the 2.26Ghz in favor of the 2.53Ghz or 2.66Ghz as standard, with the 2.8Ghz and 2.93Ghz as the upgrades. (the 3.2Ghz is clearly too hot) This would be far more similar to the Mac Pro configurations in the past, where the base CPU + 2 upgrade levels usually represented the 3 fastest CPUs available (or nearly that).
To show the huge discrepancy, there are 6!! CPU levels above the 2.26Ghz 5520. (2.4, 2.53, 2.66, 2.8, 2.9, 3.2)
I was looking forward to maybe picking up a Mac Pro for the office, (software dev) but I'm not sure now. If the HAckintosh crew gets to a certain level of progress that offers no-hassle installation and complete compatibility with mainstream components, I can see many enthusiasts who want to dualboot OSX using high-clock speed Core i7 boxes, with loads of ram, SSDs, RAID'd drive storage, GTX285s, etc, and still spending far less than the single-cpu 2.93Ghz Mac Pro.
mcoady - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Firewire 800 works with 400 and 200. You just need a cable with the appropriate connectors, it will auto-negotiate the connection.Firewire rocks.
mesiah - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Too many sites get in mac vs pc battles any time a mac review goes up. I'm not going to bash apple and talk about how overpriced things are. But honestly, I've always been a pc person. In the past apple did have some innovations to tout and some people could justify the premium price. But looking at these 2009 models, it's a disgrace. for 3k+ we are getting 640gb HDDs, video cards with 512mb frame buffers, and 6gb of ram. And in return you get a xeon processor. For a company that tries to cut a niche out by offering the highest performance for a premium, this seems like a joke to me. Its like taking a chevy cobalt and putting a corvette engine in it, then trying to sell it for the price of a Ferrari. It seems to me when it comes to the desktop market these days, people are paying thousands of dollars because they like apples OS, and overlooking the hardware as long as the case looks cool and has a xeon sticker on it. Unfortunately most tech sites these days are in love with apple and just pretend that everything is fine and dandy. I am glad that you pointed out the deficiencies Anand, but I think all apple fans should be more vocal and actually show some disgust for your beloved company for once. If you are going to pay all that money, you should atleast get some innovation to show for it.TheFace - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Since when has apple been all about the performance of the hardware? Apple is about the performance of the hardware/software package. These aren't corvettes or ferraris for you to zip around fun-town with. These are peterbilts and mack trucks to get work done with. This is a PRO model. Just because it LOOKS like a regular pc with it's big boxy structure, doesn't mean it's your home PC. I will concede that the author of the article does make some valid points about the lack of SSD and video card options. The fact is though, the mac pro isn't for the l337 who build SLI OC'd gaming rigs.If you don't understand that Apple rarely makes an upgrade without having an unveiling party about it, then you just don't understand Apple. I'm not saying that that fact is a good thing, but they certainly generate more press and hype than other computer makers.
Shadowself - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
Interesting that you state, " I'm not going to bash apple and talk about how overpriced things are." then you go on to do virtually noting but this.Are Apple's Mac Pro systems over priced? Yes. Are they more over priced than historically for Apple? Yes. However, as Anand points out this seems to be a trend with all tier one vendors. The equivalent machines out of HP and Dell are similarly or higher priced. Is this justifiable? No. They are all just gouging their high end users.
mesiah - Wednesday, July 15, 2009 - link
No, I did not bash apples price. I did not compare it to comperable PCs. I clearly pointed out that there is no innovation here to demand the premium price. But people like you are so used to having to defend your purchase based on this argument, thats all you've got. This is not a mack truck by any means. Real workstations have more than 3gb of ram standard. Real workstations have more than a measly 640gb HDD. Real workstations come with high speed SSD or SAS system disks. Yes, it is capable of high end graphics work. And yes, you can get a dell for $8000. But you are making that comparison not me. If you want to make it, go see what you get for 4k from dell. And those dells are not marketed at the main stream. If I walk into a dell store a salesman isn't going to try and sell me a workstation because I am a power user. When I walk into an apple store there is no hesitation to push me in the direction of a 3k+ purchase. But none of that was my point and not what was discussed in my comment. It was simply, where is my innovation that apple is supposed to be all about? I'm not talking about some quad sli water cooled system, I'm talking about simple things like 6GB of ram standard. SSD system drives. Atleast a TB of storage. Seriously, this is for power users and it comes standard with 640GB? I will admit apple gets some things right. And they are damned good at marketing. But please people, you don't have to kiss steves ass all the way to the bank. Don't make excuses for products that are clearly lacking. Otherwise your precious macs will just continue the long slide into bland vanilla every day systems and you will still be paying premium prices for everyday merchandise.