Apple's Mac Pro: A Discussion of Specifications
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 9, 2006 3:54 PM EST- Posted in
- Mac
Drive Options
One of the biggest complaints about the PowerMac G5s was that the chassis, despite being absolutely massive, only featured two 3.5" hard drive bays and no room for extra optical devices. The new Mac Pro chassis, although identical from the outside, has been totally revamped on the inside to accommodate a total of four 3.5" SATA hard drives and up to two optical drives.
Apple allows you to order your system with as few or as many of these bays populated as possible, but if you look closely at the pricing, you may want to avoid letting Apple upgrade your hard drive for you. Below we compared the price of Apple's drive upgrades to the best prices we were able to find for various 500GB drives on our Real Time Price Engine:
| Drive Upgrade | Price |
Apple Store: 500GB Upgrade |
$200 |
Apple Store: Extra 500GB |
$400 |
Hitachi Deskstar 7K500 500GB |
|
Maxtor DiamondMax 11 500GB |
|
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB |
|
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB |
|
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS 500GB |
For $200 more Apple will swap the default 250GB SATA drive for a 500GB unit, manufacturer and model unspecified. Compared to the cost of a stand alone 500GB drive, Apple's upgrade is the cheapest you can get, however the better route is to have Apple leave the 250GB intact and simply pay $209 for another 500GB drive giving you a total of 750GB of storage for the same price that Apple would charge you for 500GB.
Populating the 2nd, 3rd and 4th drive bays with a 500GB drive costs $400 a pop at Apple, the choice here is simple: buy the drive on your own. Note that you can currently buy Seagate's 750GB drive for as little as $346, a far better bargain than Apple's $400 upgrades. Unlike video cards which require Mac specific versions, all SATA hard drives should work just fine on the Mac Pro.
Apple also moved to a two optical drive layout with the new Mac Pro; currently you have the option of upgrading to two SuperDrives, but we'd expect that in the future one of those bays may end up with a Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive in it.
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michael2k - Friday, August 11, 2006 - link
fb dimms, found in Mac Pros, are fast serial ram using DDR chips.OddTSi - Friday, August 11, 2006 - link
Perhaps you missed the part where I said "non-ad hoc."I know what FB-DIMMs are, but they're more of a band-aid fix or a hack than a ground-up design.
michael2k - Friday, August 11, 2006 - link
Maybe you misused "ad hoc". Ad hoc means unplanned and temporary. Why do you think fb-dimm is a band-aid or a hack? Because the RAM chips themselves are not serial in nature?I mean, are you asking "Is there any designs or plans for serial memory chips?"
To be cost effective you either have to use existing infrastructure, or create a logical evolution/adaptation of the existing infrastructure.
AdvanS13 - Thursday, August 10, 2006 - link
does anyone know apples market segment share for dual processor workstations?peternelson - Thursday, August 10, 2006 - link
1) I think a gpu swap will need drivers or firmware updating.
2) To buy a commodity sata drive is good but it MIGHT require the apple carrier in order to fit into the chassis.
3) You compare apple memory with commodity FBDIMM.
In the table you quote Apple's UPGRADE (ie on top of base machine) price against the complete cost of the memory. This makes Apple's pricing appear better than it is. Even then it looks like a ripoff, but also consider they are charging you for the base memory in with the basic system price.
aliasfox - Friday, August 11, 2006 - link
As far as I've read, the Mac Pros come with carriers in all four bays - carriers that don't need cables (ribbon or round). Didn't know the backs of SATA drives were similar enough that they could just be plugged in.JeffDM - Saturday, August 12, 2006 - link
It's not stated in the Anand article, but all drive carriers are included. Apple's Tech Specs page says it, although it could have been more clearly stated. For what it's worth, I think it is worth downgrading the stock drive to 160GB and spending that difference toward additional drives. Going from 250GB to 160GB saves $75, that price difference would buy you a 250GB SATAII drive.JAS - Thursday, August 10, 2006 - link
It appears that some people managed to receive their Mac Pro quickly.http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2006/08/ma...">http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/macword/2006/08/ma...
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/06/26/xeon_wood...">http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/06/2...odcrest_...Check out the memory bandwidth benchmark. Quad channel is needed to match Core 2 systems' memory bandwidth using only dual channel. Dual channel on Xeon 5100 drops to approximately 68% of the quad channel bandwidth. That in numbers is 3.8GB/sec. Not to mention Xeon 5100 series has 25% higher memory FSB. It needs 25% higher FSB and 2x memory channels to achieve the same memory bandwidth numbers the desktop Core 2's can. According to memory latency benchmarks, the latency is also significantly higher on the Woodcrest than Conroe's platform.
The chipset on the Xeon 5100 is worse in performance than the chipset on the Core 2. It will NOT beat Core 2 because of the 25% higher FSB, it will rather be SLOWER. Not to mention FB-DIMM makes it even slower.
SpecFP benchmarks also support this:
Xeon 5160(3GHz/1333MHz FSB/4MB L2/8x1024MB FB-DIMM DDR2-667): 2775
Core 2 Extreme X6800(2.93GHz/1066MHz FSB/4MB L2/2x1024MB DDR2-800 5-5-5-15): 3046
Core 2 Extreme gets almost 10% higher in the memory substem portion of the SpecCPU 2K. benchmark, even though it has 2.2% less clock speed than the Xeon 5160.
Look here: http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772&am...">http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772&am...
"ScienceMark didn't agree completely and reported about 65-70 ns latency on the Opteron system and 70-76 ns (230 cycles) on the Woodcrest system. We have reason to believe that Woodcrest's latency is closer to what LMBench reports: the excellent prefetchers are hiding the true latency numbers from Sciencemark. It must also be said that the measurements for the Opteron on the Opteron are only for the local memory, not the remote memory."
Xeon 5160 got 70-76ns in ScienceMark, what did Core 2 get?? It got 36.75. Xeon 5160's ScienceMark latency is higher than Pentium Extreme Edition 965's latency, and twice the latency of Core 2.
Everest shows the same thing: http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0801/graph...">http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2006/0801/graph...
Xeon 5160: 99.1
Opteron 285: 57.7(seems higher than FX-62 results but this system uses Registered DDR DIMM, you can see in AT's results that AM2 further lowers latency)
Core 2 Extreme: 59.8
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...
dcalfine - Wednesday, August 9, 2006 - link
Overall, I think this is a very well-designed system, and in price comparisons with Dell, the Mac Pro came out over a thousand dollars cheaper for a similar system. I may be a fanboy, but I can admit that Apple still has some work to do here. As good as the Mac Pro is, I think Apple needs to start having better video options. For starters, the X500 chipset is used, which means that there's only one 16X PCIe lane. Also, Apple should get closer with Nvidia and start working in SLI, as well as FX4500X2 and FX5500. A Vanilla FX4500 just doesn't make the cut anymore. Also, the X500 chipset supports one 133X PCIX slot, which, I think, Apple should have incorporated, since not every expansion card has moved to the PCIe format.I'd like to see some speed comparisons between the mac pro and some pcs. I imagine that in most (if not all) test the Mac Pro will come out slightly slower than the PC due to the bells and whistles of Mac OS X, but I'd like to see just how much slower it runs, and how it runs in Boot Camp running Windows/Linux.
But, yeah. Good goin', Apple!
And AnandTech, get your hans on one of these ASAP!