Apple's Mac Pro - Upgrading CPUs, Memory & Running XP
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2006 1:51 AM EST- Posted in
- Mac
3D Rendering Performance using 3dsmax 7 & CineBench 9.5
We're looking at 3D rendering performance using two different applications: 3D Studio Max and Cinebench 9.5. Cinebench is a free performance testing utility based off of the CINEMA 4D R8 rendering package. Our scores from 3D Studio Max are a composite score from four rendering tests: CBalls2, SinglePipe2, UnderWater, and 3dsmax5 Rays.
Given how much of a boost we saw going from one to two cores in 3dsmax, the incredible performance of the four core Mac Pro 3.0GHz is not surprising. When Intel releases its upcoming Kentsfield processor, you should be able to attain similar performance to the Mac Pro 3.0GHz in a single socket. Naturally, at that point you should also be able to upgrade the Mac Pro to eight cores. Dual socket PC workstations are also be available that compete with the Mac Pro in terms of CPU cores, though without OS X support.
In CineBench's single threaded test, the Mac Pro 3.0GHz and Core 2 Extreme X6800 is virtually identical. The Mac Pro should be a bit faster thanks to its faster FSB and slightly higher clock speed, but the use of FB-DIMMs results in a bit of a performance penalty that ends up evening out the performance.
The multithreaded CineBench test shows us similar scaling to what we saw in 3dsmax; the move to four cores gives the Mac Pro a 65% boost in performance.
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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