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'Nehalem' Mac Pro unboxed and benchmarked

A MacRumors forum user who got his Nehalem Mac Pro has shared his experiences unboxing the new beast and benchmarked the system's memory and processor performance in GeekBench Result Browser. Below is the system configuration of the "Nehalem" Mac Pro he got.

  • Processor 065-8315 Two 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
  • Memory 065-8333 6GB (6X1GB)
  • Graphics Card 065-8316 ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
  • Hard Drive Bay1 065-8537 640GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb
  • Optical Drive 065-7923 One 18x SuperDrive
  • Wireless Option 065-7925
  • Mini Display Port Adapter 065-8677
  • Mini Display Port Adapter2 065-8679
  • Fibre Chl Card 065-7929

The Geekbench benchmark for the 2.93GHz, dual Quad-Core Nehalem system gave a total score of 17,665, giving it the second place in the list of all GeekBench 2 scores. Multi-threaded functions and memory performance contribute to the highest gains in the scores of the new system. The 3.2GHz 8-core Mac Pro has got a score of 11,030 with many results in the 9,000 range. The multi-core performance of the new 2.93GHz processor has significantly outpaced the previous generation machines.

The Geekbench benchmark score of the new Nehalem 2.26GHz Mac Pro turns out to be in the range of 11226-13113. Also the 2.26GHz 8-core Nehalem performed comparably to the previous 2.8GHz 8-core processor in multi-threaded tasks, but worse at single threaded tasks. Nehalem processors driven by lower clock speed excelled at multi-threaded tasks, but the performance turned out to be slower at single-threaded tasks due to the lower clock speed. The Cinebench benchmark results chart compiled by MacRumors users as shown below reiterates the same fact.

Based on the Mac performance benchmark results, Macrumors concludes that it makes more sense to buy a faster Quad-Core than a slower Octo-Core.

For more unboxing pictures posted by the user, visit here. You can also see Apple's performance charts for Mac Pro's and GeekBench's Mac Performance Chart to know all the Mac performance benchmarks as of February 2009.

*Images Courtesy: MacRumors:Forums

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