Follow Up--Dual Quad-Core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro, How Fast Is It?

Last Tuesday, I posted first impressions of my new dual quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro. I waited to order it until the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics card upgrade was actually available because I got screwed on my last desktop purchase, a PowerMac G5 Quad. Apple never made available the faster Nvidia 7800 GT graphics card upgrade for the PowerMac G5 Quad as a separate upgrade kit, at least not as long as I owned it.

Here are the results from my usual suite of speed tests.

Speed of Dual Quad-Core 2.8GHz Mac Pro*

Test	Mac Pro	MacBook Pro 2.4GHz C2D	PowerMac G5 2.5GHz Quad
BENCHMARKS
Altivec Fractal 1.3 (GFLOPS)	40.5	9.8	25.3
Cinebench 9.5 Rendering (2x)	2149	646	1194
-OpenGL Hardware Lighting	5319	4122	2219
Let1kWindowsBloom 1.0+	8	11	6
Xbench 1.3 - CPU	190	150	124
- Threading	811	188	243
- Memory	182	158	132
- Quartz Graphics	228	192	149
- OpenGL Graphics	191	161	136
-User Interface Graphcs	403	326	236
"REAL WORLD" TESTS
Startup (sec)	25	52	41
Shutdown (sec)	12	7	12
Dup. 500 MB Folder (sec)	28	63	34
Quake III Arena (frames/sec)	999	686	417
Halo 2.0.2 (frames/sec)	98	115	31

As expected, the Mac Pro is quite faster in virtually every respect than the older PowerMac G5 Quad, although the comparison is somewhat confounded since the PowerMac G5 was running 10.4.6 Tiger and there are speed differences between Tiger and Leopard, at least in Intel-based Macs.

The Mac Pro is also much faster, with one very disappointing exception, than my 15" 2.4GHz MacBook Pro C2D-LED (now for sale on eBay). The exception is the frame rate for the game Halo where the MacBook Pro with Nvidia GeForce 8600M graphics scores 17% better than the Mac Pro with the much faster Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT graphics. Hopefully, this means that Apple simply needs to improve the drivers for the just-released 8800 GT and will. [Bill Fox]