In iMovie, we applied the Aged Film Effect from the Video FX menu to a one minute movie. We used Compressor to encode a 6minute:26second DV file using the DVD: Fastest Encode 120 minutes – 4:3 setting.
We recorded how long it took to render a scene in Cinema 4D XL. Photoshop’s memory was set to 70 percent and History was set to Minimum. The Photoshop Suite test is a set of 14 scripted tasks using a 50MB file.
All systems were running Mac OS X 10.5.6 with the Mac Pro 2.66GHz Quad Core outfitted with 3GB of RAM, and the Mac Pro 2.26GHz 8-Core with 6GB of RAM. Adobe Photoshop, Cinema 4D XL, iMovie, iTunes, and Finder scores are in minutes:seconds. Speedmark 5 scores are relative to those of a 1.5GHz Core Solo Mac mini, which is assigned a score of 100. It was also 27 percent faster in our Photoshop tests, and 20 percent faster at Compressor than the older system.Ģ.66GHz Quad-Core/2.26GHz Eight-Core Mac Pro benchmarksīest results in bold. The new quad-core’s score in our overall system performance suite, Speedmark 5, was 16 percent faster than that of the previous 2.8GHz eight-core Mac Pro. That’s pretty impressive considering that the new Mac Pro is using only half the number of processing cores as last year’s standard configuration-and at a slower speed. So do all of these innovations translate to better performance? The 2.66GHz quad-core Mac Pro posted faster speeds in Photoshop, Compressor, iMovie, iTunes, and 3-D game benchmarks than the previous standard eight-core Mac Pro. This lets a 2.93GHz Xeon, for example, run at speeds as high as 3.33GHz, Apple says.
Turbo Boost helps speed up the majority of applications that haven’t been written to take full advantage of multicore processors by allowing the system to spin down idle processing cores while increasing the speed of the processors in use. Also new to the Nehalem processors is a technology Intel calls Turbo Boost. Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith, Chris Holt, and Helen Williamson.Ī technology called Hyper-Threading creates two virtual cores per each physical core, allowing each physical core to run two processes at once, which helps use the available processing power more efficiently. Blue bars in italics represent reference systems. Installed in the first PCI Express 2.0 slot is the new Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics card with 512MB of video RAM the last generation of Mac Pros came standard with an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of memory.Ģ.66GHz Quad-Core/2.26GHz Eight-Core Mac Pro Speedmark Scores Apple has also made installation of its add-on Apple RAID card much easier: you just put it into the clearly marked top slot, and you’re ready to go. You now simply push a single thin bar that extends across all the PCI Express 2.0 slots to release any or all cards. With the new Mac Pro, that second step is much easier. Then you had to feel around behind the card, searching for a little plastic tab mounted on the motherboard, which you needed to lift up in order to release the card. In the past, to remove a card, you’d first need to turn two large thumbscrews that held a small plate keeping the cards in place. Another nice design change helps ease the removal of PCI cards from the four full-size PCI Express 2.0 card slots. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve struggled over the years to remove that first drive. Now, though, the large plastic piece holding the fan near the front of the Mac Pro is much smaller, giving your fingers more room to grip the hard-drive sleds.
The Mac Pro still has four internal cable-free hard-drive slots, using a sliding tray to attach the drives directly to the motherboard. The memory design no longer requires the large heat sinks. The quad-core Mac Pro has four memory slots that ship with 3GB, 6GB, or 8GB of 1,066MHz DDR3 SDRAM modules the eight-core Mac Pro has eight DIMM slots for a maximum of 32GB of RAM. The memory modules are no longer installed on two sliding trays-instead, the memory and processor all rest on a sled at the bottom of the case, which you remove by releasing two latches. Upon opening the case, you immediately notice major changes in the layout of the components.