Mac Pro Westmere Test Machine Configuration
Last updated
January 8, 2010
Unless otherwise noted, the test configurations were as follows:
- 2010 Mac Pro Westmere 12-core @ 3.33GHz (!). This is an upgraded system from 2.4GHz 8-core.
- 2010 Mac Pro Westmere 6-core @ 3.33GHz.
- 2010 Mac Pro Nehalem 4-core @ 3.2GHz (W3565). This chip runs its bus at 4.8GT/s vs 6.4GT/s for the 3.33Ghz 6-core chip (25% slower).
- 2009 Mac Pro Nehalem 4-core @ 3.33GHz.
- 2010 Mac Pro Westmere 8-core @ 2.4GHz.
- 2009 Mac Pro Nehalem 8-core @ 2.93Ghz.
- 2010 MPG Pro One (iMac) 4-core @ 2.93GHz.
All machines were booted with the 64-bit Snow Leopard kernel.
Dual 200GB solid states drives were used for a RAID-0 stripe boot drive in all machines. The Mac Pros used 24GB memory for most tests (32GB as noted). The iMac was maxed-out at 16GB. In other words, the core of an MPG Pro Workstation and the MPG Pro One iMac.
The 2010 Mac Pro has a much more powerful video card, the ATI Radeon 5870 with 1GB of memory. For most uses, it offers exactly zero advantage over the stock 5770 card. Save the $200 and put it towards an MPG Pro Workstation, or a quality solid state drive.
