Apple Mac Pro (Mid 2010) review

As its name suggests, the Mac Pro is Apple's high-end desktop computer. It's a workstation designed for seriously demanding tasks, such as page design, production-level video or photo editing and CAD work. Most of Apple's computers have a very locked-down design with a limited choice of specification options. The Mac Pro, on the other hand, is a tower computer that's designed to be easily upgradeable and its specifications can be endlessly customised if you order it from Apple's online store.

Given its status as Apple's most powerful Mac, we weren't surprised to discover that Apple had sent us a review unit with an incredibly high-powered specification. It comes equipped with a staggering 12GB of RAM and not one, but two six-core 2.93GHz Xeon X5670 processors. MacOS X 10.6 is preinstalled on a 512GB solid state disk (SSD). It's accompanied by a huge 2TB hard disk for storing all your files. It's a monster of a computer.

Thanks to Intel's Hyper Threading technology, the 12 physical processing cores in our Mac Pro are seen by both the MacOS and Windows as 24 cores which should boost performance even further. The Xeon X5670 processors can also temporarily boost their clock speed from 2.93GHz to 3.33GHz to accelerate application performance even more.

However, despite these impressive capabilities, the Mac Pro wasn't as fast in our Windows application benchmarks as one would expect. As with many commercially available applications, our benchmarks don't take full advantage of all the available processing cores. For example, in our multiple applications test, our Mac Pro scored just 201 which means it's just over two times as fast as our quad-core AMD Phenom II X4 base system. One therefore shouldn't expect the 12-core Mac Pro to outperform an existing quad-core computer by six times, although this does greatly depend on the software you use. It's baffling that so many applications still don't take full advantage of multiple cores - multiple core processors have been commonplace in computers for the past four years and are now ubiquitous.

3D graphics performance is also impressive. The ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics card has 1GB of memory and managed incredibly high frame rates in graphically intensive games – 89fps in Call of Duty 4 and 62fps in Crysis. This impressive 3D performance isn't just beneficial for games; it shows that the Mac Pro should have no trouble handling demanding 3D modelling, rendering and CAD programs.

Despite its impressive performance, the Mac Pro is quiet and won't sound intrusive in a hushed office. It's by no means silent – a low hum is audible if you listen closely enough. This isn't likely to be a distraction though, especially if the Mac Pro is placed under your desk, as with most tower computers.

The Mac Pro's aluminium cheese grater-like appearance hasn't changed at all since its debut and looks almost identical to its predecessor, the Power Mac G5, which was first introduced in 2003. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it still looks sleek and feels impressively robust and well-made.

More importantly, the Mac Pro is incredibly easy to upgrade. Pulling the rear-mounted latch releases the side panel giving almost instant access to the interior. The six RAM slots and the two LGA1366 processor sockets are located on a daughterboard. Pull a pair of latches and the daughterboard disconnects from the motherboard allowing it to be pulled out and placed on a tabletop. This makes upgrading memory much less fiddly than in other tower computers where you have to work within the cramped confines of the tower case.