Benchmarks: 2.93GHz Xeon-based Mac Pros set speedmark record
Thursday, April 9, 2009 at 1:26PM 
Macworld has just released it’s latest benchmark test results on the Mac Pro 2.93GHz Eight-Core.
With its four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays and four PCI Express 2.0 card slots, the Mac Pro is Apple’s most configurable Mac, and the company offers a host of different upgrades and options. Macworld Lab tested a couple of different Mac Pro configure-to-order (CTO) systems and the results include our first Speedmark 5 score to top 400.
To refresh your memory, the latest Mac Pros come in two standard configurations. The $2,499 Mac Pro features a 2.66GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor based on Intel’s Nehalem architecture. It has a 640GB hard drive, 3GB of 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM, and an Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics card with 512MB of DDR3 memory. The second standard configuration model is a $3,299 Eight-Core model that uses two Quad-Core Xeon processors running at 2.26GHz. It has twice the amount of SDRAM as the $2,499 Mac Pro, but uses the same Nvidia graphics card and same hard drive.
The CTO Mac Pros that we received for testing had 1TB hard drives (an option that will run you an extra $100) and ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards with 512MB of GDDR5 graphics memory (a $200 upgrade). Both CTO models featured faster 2.93GHz Quad-Core Xeon processors-a $500 upgrade for the Quad-Core 2.66GHz model, and a $2,600 upgrade for the standard Eight-Core 2.26GHz model.
