Evaluating Performance of a Xeon 5355-based Mac Pro
2007-02-20par Lionel
Thanks to Intel, we could install two Xeon 5355 in a Mac Pro - Is the 8 cores-based architecture faster than the 4 cores-based one?
Introduction
This article is the second part of our test with the Quad Core Xeon X5355 initiated with the previous article: http://www.hardmac.com/articles/70/.
Having set up a powerful Mac Pro based on two Quad Core Xeon X5355s, we ran some tests and benchmarks to evaluate if this 8 core-based machine would be useful with current software, applications and OSX settings. In other word, do 8 2.66GHz cores make a big difference compared to 4 cores at 3.0GHz?
Let's first start with the potential effect of 8 cores and the higher heat released by the Xeon 5355-based Mac Pro (240W vs. 160W for the 3.0GHz model). The machine remains silent despite heavy heavy CPU load, we only noticed the fan speeding up from 600rpm to 650 rpm once, but without hearing any changes. So the current Mac Pro architecture is already built and ready for the Xeon 5355.
To make as accurate as possible of a test, the machine featured 2 Raptor 150 in RAID 0 settings and 4GB of RAM, and runs 10.4.8 (all updates completed).
