It’s time for my Mac Pro review. We have had it for two weeks now and I thought I would tell you what I think.
Performance
Coming off a Dell inspiron 6400 1.6Ghz Core Duo, the Mac Pro is no small leap in speed. Bootup time is roughly 30 seconds and iPhoto is nearly instant and firefox is 2 seconds
On the Left is the Mac Pro importing full HD video and it still has a load of processor felt for me to use.On the right is the RAM usage during importing HD footage.
I am amazed to see how often the separate 4 cores are used because you hear so often that programs are not using the computers full potential like parallels.
The 5GB of ram we have put in is what I would suggest to anyone who is buying this machine. When we leave the machine running it takes nearly 2GB of ram on its own so a large amount of ram is key.
Design
It has not had a major case change for a while now but still looks better than any other dell or other manufactures design. Inside there is far more space than before and it is quiet.
Setup Process
The Hard Drives came preinstalled and so did the extra ram all we had to do was partition the Drives and we were off (we did not buy from apple). The setup was easy and the step to step guide helped us
Upgradeable
For those still tossing up between the baseline Mac Pro and a “lesser” system from Apple such as the iMac. I would say the iMac is a very capable machine and well worth the money, but not for professionals it just has not got the expandability and power.
Software
Wow iLife 08’ is a big improvement on iLife 06’ with the new iPhoto and iMovie (which got updates yesterday so now I can fade music in and out) as two major new apps or upgrades they make the suite fit a whole lot better and iWeb 08’ is perfect for putting put a small basic site together.(we have been using pixelmator an you will get a review soon).
Concluding Thoughts
It runs super fast and is quiet. This machine allows the owner to do anything they want (run windows), it is one of the fastest machines I have come across and best looking. If you want it go for it, I love it. The software is simple of the Mac and it took seconds to learn how to use it.
