4 replies to this topic

[IMG News]

Peter Cohen from MacWorld has posted a weblog on the release of the new Mac Pro from Apple.

Peter takes a look at the features of the new Apple tower such as the 16-lane double-wide PCI Express slot and what it means to the Mac gaming community:

The Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT card that Apple includes in the “standard” Mac Pro configuration is competent enough, but the best cost benefit for gamers appears to be the ATI Radeon X1900 XT card you can add on to the system for an additional $350. Apple’s own benchmarks running Doom 3 and Quake 4 produce frame rates more than twice as high with the ATI Radeon X1900 card than with the GeForce 7300. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise—the memory bandwidth, number of vertices per second the cards can process, and fill rate make the Radeon X1900 XT a much better fit for gamers.

You can read Peter's entire weblog following the link below.

Return to Full Article - InsideMacGames News

[nagromme]

"The Xeon hasn’t exactly distinguished itself as the ultimate gaming microprocessor. Many PC gamers have preferred AMD’s offerings because they produce better benchmarks for games"

The author mistakenly thinks the Mac Pro uses the OLD (Netburst/Pentium-4-era) Xeon chips.

So to be clear, they use the NEW Xeons (5100 series) which use the Core Microarchitecture, NOT the Pentium 4's architecture used by former Xeons. These Xeons are a step above Core 2 Duo (Conroe) and do test out very well against AMD. They are the fastest PC chips you can get.

[bookman]

nagromme, on August 10th 2006, 12:30 PM, said:

"The Xeon hasn’t exactly distinguished itself as the ultimate gaming microprocessor. Many PC gamers have preferred AMD’s offerings because they produce better benchmarks for games"

The author mistakenly thinks the Mac Pro uses the OLD (Netburst/Pentium-4-era) Xeon chips.

So to be clear, they use the NEW Xeons (5100 series) which use the Core Microarchitecture, NOT the Pentium 4's architecture used by former Xeons. These Xeons are a step above Core 2 Duo (Conroe) and do test out very well against AMD. They are the fastest PC chips you can get.

The author was taken to task for this in their comments section as well.

[nagromme]

I like the name "Xeon" better than "Dual Core 2 Duo II" anyway

[StopDropBurn]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic is all I have to say.