Breathing new life into old Mac Pros<article>
<section class="page">
<p>
As we saw in our
first round of benchmarks, the new
Mac Pro is more of a specialized workstation than a
general purpose computer. In fact, unless you’re using a pro app that takes advantage of multiple processing cores, a tricked-out iMac may outperform the new Mac Pro.
</p>
<figure class="medium right"><a class="zoom" href="
http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2014/01/sapphire-hd-7950-mac-100224438-orig.jpg">
[/url] <figcaption>
<p>
Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition graphics card.
</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>
For this round of testing we wanted to see how upgrading our 2012 Mac Pros would help close the performance gap with the new Mac Pro. We started with our stock 2012 quad-core and dual six-core (12 cores total)
Mac Pros and upgraded them with fast flash storage via OWC’s
Mercury Accelsior E2 PCIe SSD ($630), 32GB of RAM from
Crucial, and faster
Sapphire HD 7950 Mac Edition ($500) graphics.
</p>
<div class="statsTable tableLarge">
<h2>Speedmark 9 scores</h2>
<table class="stats" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tbody>
<tr><th class="col1">Mac model</th><th>Speedmark 9 Score</th></tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">Mac Pro 8-core/3.0GHz (32GB RAM, 512GB flash storage, dual AMD Fire Pro D700 (6GB each card), Late 2013)</td>
<td><strong>350</strong></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">Mac Pro quad-core/3.2GHz (6GB RAM, 1TB HD,1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770, Mid 2012)</td>
<td>171</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">Mac Pro quad-core/3.2GHz (32GB RAM, 480GB SSD, 3GB AMD Sapphire HD 7950, Mid 2012)</td>
<td>241</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">Mac Pro 12-core/2.4GHz (12GB RAM, 1TB HD, 1GB Radeon HD 5770, Mid 2012)</td>
<td>196</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">Mac Pro 12-core/2.4GHz (32GB RAM, 480GB SSD, 3GB AMD Sapphire HD 7950, Mid 2012)</td>
<td>256</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="col1">iMac quad-core/3.5GHz (27", 8GB RAM, 3TB Fusion Drive, 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 780M, Late 2013)</td>
<td>326</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p class="caption">Results are scores. Higher results are better. Best score in <strong>bold</strong>.—Macworld Lab testing by James Galbraith and Albert Filice
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Breathing new life into old Mac Pros
