Upgrading and Analyzing Apple's Nehalem Mac Pro
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 13, 2009 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Final Words
With this I hope I can retire from writing epic-ly long Apple articles for a while, but I'm not done yet - I must first conclude.
The new Mac Pro is fast and expensive. As I casually mentioned on the performance page, if you're upgrading from a PowerMac G5 then even the cheapest iMac (or even the Mac mini) will have more processing power; an upgrade to the Nehalem Mac Pro will absolutely rock your world.
If you have one of the original Mac Pros from 2006, the new Mac Pro should be an upgrade provided that you're at all CPU bound in your tasks. Clock speed is important however, going from a pair of 3.0GHz Woodcrest based Xeons in the first Mac Pro to a 2.26GHz Nehalem based Xeon won't always give you better performance. The entry level 2.26GHz Xeons for the 8-core Mac Pro are ridiculous given the price point of the system, but so are the upgrade prices for the 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz processors. If you do have a highly threaded workload you can always get the entry level 8-core and then upgrade the CPUs on your own down the line if you're careful.
Now if you’re running applications that stress all eight cores in the $3299 Mac Pro then the clock speed difference won’t matter. But if all you’re doing is stressing four cores then the $2499 machine will perform noticeably better (and save you some money). Apple effectively offers a machine optimized for users of heavily threaded workloads and one for everyone else, they just don’t advertise it as such.
Ultimately, it’s all about snappiness and response time. The new Mac Pro makes tasks that generally take several minutes to hours run in considerably less time, but still on the same order of magnitude of performance. Compiling Adium took 130 seconds on my old eight-core Mac Pro and less than 90 on my new one. That’s a noticeable performance improvement. Unfortunately some aspects of the Mac Pro just haven’t improved that much at all. Application launch time and general use performance are still very I/O bottlenecked; these things need SSDs and with a price tag of over $3,000 there's absolutely no excuse for Apple not including one.
If you have a Mac Pro from last year and aren't doing a lot of heavily threaded work, stick a SSD in your machine, it'll feel better than new.
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jamesst - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
"The Lexar reader is FireWire 800 (woo!) and the iSight is FireWire 400; I can’t use the iSight on the new Mac Pro."You can still use your Firewire 400 iSight camera on the Mac Pro's Firewire 800 ports. All you need is a Firewire 400 to Firewire 800 cable. I know that Belkin makes just such a cable and I even purchased one at my local Apple Store here in Raleigh, NC.
joelypolly - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
I have actually had something similar happen to a socket I was working on. It was a matter of finding a sewing needle and moving each "pin" back to the original position.HilbertSpace - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
It would be interesting to try swapping the 2-socket tray with a 1-socket Mac Pro, and see if it works(?) Would be cheaper to buy the 2-socket board and upgrade yourself, no?MonkeyPaw - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
Are FB-DIMMs going to disappear from the market? While at first it doesn't sound Mac-related, original MacPro owners might soon be running out of memory upgrade options (though I doubt they've held out this long to upgrade). It wasn't cheap to start with, but it seems like it was Band-Aid technology. The IMC was the answer, but FB-DIMMs were a stop-gap until Nehalem-Xeons could arrive. Perhaps a memorial article for the technology is needed?JimmiG - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
Ok so I get it, even the "cheap" Mac Pro uses a Xeon, not an i7... But for all intents and purposes, it's an i7 920.Who in their right mind would pay $2,500 for a i7 920 system with 3GB of RAM, 640GB HDD and a rebranded Geforce 9500 GT? You can build a similar PC (or hackintosh) with the same specifications for the a fraction of the price - in fact you could also bump the RAM to 6GB and throw in a 1TB drive and a 4870 1GB or 4890 if you wanted and still stay *well* below that price point, even if using quality components and case.
The Mac Pro isn't even shiny!
plonk420 - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 - link
did you read page 10?MrDiSante - Thursday, July 16, 2009 - link
Did you read his comment?ltcommanderdata - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
Another great in depth review. Your experiences with upgrading the processors were particularly interesting although I don't think it'd be something I would try.I just wanted to suggest you Boot Camp the Mac Pro and run the benchmarks needed to add 2x2.26GHz Gainestown and 2x2.93GHz Gainestown results to the Anandtech Bench. It might also be interesting to get a sample of the new nVidia GTX285 Mac Edition. It would certainly address the 1GB of VRAM concerns and would be cheaper than getting the HD4870 if you need 2 dual-link DVI ports since you don't need to buy that finicky adapter. There really aught to be DVI to mini-DP adapters though for people who still want to use the 24" LED display.
http://www.glbenchmark.com/result.jsp">http://www.glbenchmark.com/result.jsp
Oh and for interest, there turns out to be a 3D benchmark comparing the various iPhones to other cell phones. It's called GLBenchmark and needless to say, the iPhone 3G S is a screamer. They are also detecting the iPhone 3G S GPU as a PowerVR SGX 535.
ddobrigk - Monday, July 13, 2009 - link
Actually, the Nehalem-EX's octo-core possibility is a no-go for now. It is a future product and has not been launched yet.Also, a little bit of nitpicking, but it won't use LGA1366 like these Xeons, it'll use LGA1567, because each CPU will sport a 4-channel memory controller.
In addition, it'll sport 4 QPI links, and its intended target are 4-way and 8-way systems, not really 2-way systems. A few rumors exist about some integrators being interested in 2-socket systems, though we're still a few months from actually seeing any LGA1567 motherboard on display, AFAIK. All we saw was an Intel Demo about it.
Don't know if Apple intends to go with 2-socket nehalem-exs, anyway, because when Nehalem-EX really hits the market, there'll also be the 6-core westmeres, I think. In any case, we're way beyond a reasonable number of cores for the typical user. :D
BrianMCan - Friday, July 17, 2009 - link
MacPro's really aren't meant for typical users ;)Scientific, Video/Movies, 3D, and advanced users who may do many things including the already mentioned, or many things at once. Always other things I can be doing while some video is rendering, including playing some Civ 4, or starting the next video project, researching upgrades & repairs for customers, stuff like that.
Although I personally may wait for the 2nd gen Nehalem MacPro's before I upgrade from my first gen MacPro, other than raw processing power, it does most of what I need efficiently enough.