Benchmarks for all three 8-Core Penryn Mac Pros reported - Page 2

Originally Posted by JeffDM

I think backtomac might have been thinking of the possibility there wouldn't even be a second socket soldered in. If the socket's not there, then the upgrade path would surely be crippled.

I think it's unreasonable to expect a spare heat sink to be included, I don't think anyone else includes a heat sink for unpopulated sockets. The heat sink is included with the company's CPU upgrade kits.

Originally Posted by melgross

It's not proper to say that Apple would "cripple" the machine. That's a pejorative term that is entirely out of place.

If Apple supplies a machine with one socket filled, then there would be no reason for them to supply an additional cooling system for the socket that had none. If they did that, then people would have to pay for it.

Originally Posted by backtomac

What I mean by cripple, is if Apple disable functionality that would be otherwise be present. In other words if Apple were to disable or make the second socket unusable. This does assume that Apple still uses the same MP for the single cpu MP that it uses for the dual cpu MP. Does anyone know if this is indeed the case? Seems logical but...

I would expect to pay for the additional cooling and most reasonable users should as well. Like you said this could be a nice niche for third party vendors to fill for those who want to upgrade their single cpu MPs to dual cpu MPs.

Originally Posted by melgross

And as I said, adding a chip to these machines is NOT for the fainthearted. It's not like the old G4's.

Originally Posted by melgross

It depends on how important the few percent is to you.

As far as the difference between the 2.8 and the 3.0 goes, apparently the majority of tests show the 3 to be faster. It's very possible that a few operation's speed is reversed in the different chips.

Something about bin speeds. Remember that these are supposed to be IDENTICAL chips. What that means, is that in theory, they should all be the SAME speed. There should be NO bin speed differences.

In practice, manufacturing isn't perfect. Ever so slight differences in line widths, depths, and spacing, add up to minute differences in capacitance. The higher the capacitance, the slower the speed.

BUT, these chips are hellishly complex. That means that on the same chip, there will be these variations. Where they are on the chip will decide how slow the chip is, and what part of the chip is affected the most.

So, one chip can have a silghtly higher bin speed overall, but still be slightly slower in some operations.

Each chip will be affected differently. Two chips with the same bin speed can have slight variations in operational "evenness". Some may have some operations a fair amount faster, and some a fair amount slower, and others may hover closely around the speed number given.

So, these tests we've read are valid for those machines. but, as we are talking about minute differences, too small to notice in most cases, they are not valid for a different set of machines because of the varibility in manufacturing.

This also holds true for the motherboard, as well as for the rest of the machine.

On average, each machine will be approximately spaced as they should be. It's possible that the 3.2 machine here was fast, but the 3.0 machine was slow, and that the 2.8 was also fast.

This is always going to happen when the speed differences between machines are so small. If we had a 2.6 a 2.9, and a 3.2, we wouldn't see this happening as much.

Originally Posted by Clive At Five

Can someone pit a Core 2 Duo Mac Mini against a first gen 800MHz iMac G4? I want to psych myself up for my next purchase...
..and make myself less depressed about not being able to afford a Mac Pro.
-Clive

Originally Posted by melgross

...Also, as was true for the older machines, the memory buss performs better if the first two memory slots from each board are filled.
In other words, if you have four Gb of RAM, it's faster to have it in 4 1GB sticks, than in 2 2GB sticks.Lastly, if you have 2GB of Apple RAM at 1GB per stick and then get 8 GB in 2GB sticks, put the 2GB Apple RAM in the TOP card with the 2 2GB sticks, and put the other 2 2GB sticks in the first two slots of the bottom card.

Originally Posted by StinkyOldC

what a bunch of sad geeks you lot are!

Originally Posted by Silencio

I would not assume you can easily add a second quad-core processor at a later date to the single quad-core configuration. Not sure whether Apple will ship those machines with a different heatsink, some sort of thermal recalibration will probably have to be run from an Apple Service Diagnostic disc, and it is likely that the retail price of a 2.8GHz Harpertown processor will greatly exceed the $500 Apple essentially charges for it for quite some time.

Despite that, the new quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro is a much better buy as a low-end machine than the old 2.0GHz Mac Pro, which I assume nobody even bought. But I think it's better to buy the octo-core now and just be done with it.

Originally Posted by Royboy

But don't lament. You made the best choice. So now you have all that available money to spend on a new Mac Pro with all kind of cores. And now the Mac Pros don't seem to be expensive at all in comparison to the 2001 prices. Very smart move.

Originally Posted by nvidia2008

You are sadder for posting on this thread when you obviously don't know or don't care about this stuff. We may be geeks (and proud of it), but you sir, are a tool.

Originally Posted by Multimedia

I agree. The resale value of a single Quad 2.8GHz MP will be much lower than the $500 you "save" now. Plus you can't necessarily imagine why you will want 8 cores in six months to a year from now as those reasons are yet to be revealed at NAB and WWDC '08.

Remember, next year Apple will likely offer 16 core Mac Pros. Then how will you feel about a 4 core purchase this year when you could have had 8 for only $500 more?

Originally Posted by kb9uwu

I just ordered the 4 core for $2100 with the edu discount. Apple only gives a $450 rebate on the single cpu with the edu discount...... I'm sure in a year or two I'll be complaining about only having one 4 core processor, but then it will be time to get the new 16 core mac pro

Originally Posted by Royboy

Unless you are a professional that can and does have use for an 8 core, I don't believe you will be complaining.

Originally Posted by ukrunr

Guess I'll run Geekbench on my new 3.0GHz when I receive it and we'll see, I'm already committed to getting it and I expect my numbers will be better than those tested so far.

Originally Posted by ukrunr

Just got my new Mac Pro with dual 3.0GHz cpu's and ran the Geekbench 2 benchmarks.

Glad to say that in majority of tests, it posts higher than this original article had. In fact some of the data is now >3.2GHz cpu. I only used the 32-bit eval version, no opportunity to run in 64 bit.

Here are the summaries per section...

Overall - 8210 (original test=7742)
Integer - 8663 (original test=8071)
Floating - 12753 (original test=12306)
Memory - 2560 (original test=2509)
Stream - 2029 (original test=2031)

Regards, Dave.

Originally Posted by MacProUser

Would someone like to comment on the worse H.264 ENCODE results for the 3 GHz Mac Pro ????????????????????? By the way - it´s the X5472, not the E5472 ...

Originally Posted by solipsism

I speculate that it's related to the video card in these machine. I am guessing the 3GHz had the stock 2600 and the 2.8GHz was using the 8800. I also speculate that the three tests in which the 2.8GHz did better were ones that offloaded some of the work to VGC.