Apple Reveals Mac Pro with Nehalem Xeon CPUs

The Apple store went down this morning and while the little post-it note on our screens came with the message, “we’re updating the store for you and will be back shortly.” We tried not to get too excited. Could be nothing, we thought. It wasn’t.

Apple has announced a new Mac Pro based on Intel’s Nehalem (Xeon) processor. With a starting price of $2,499, the new machine comes packed with either a single 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3500, or a dual 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 and the Nvidia GeForce GT 120 with 512 MB of RAM. Apple has also tidied up the inside of the machine to allow for easy expansions. The Pro includes four direct-attach cable-free hard drive carriers for installing up to 4 TB of internal storage and an optional cable-free Mac Pro RAID card allows the four internal drive bays to be set up in RAID 0, 1, 5, or 0+1 configurations.

The new quad-core Mac Pro, $2,499 (US):

  • one 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 3500 series processor with 8MB of L3 cache;
  • 3 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 8GB;
  • Nvidia GeForce GT 120 graphics with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory;
  • 640 GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
  • 18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
  • Mini DisplayPort and DVI (dual-link) for video output (adapters sold separately);
  • four PCI Express 2.0 slots;
  • five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports;
  • Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and
  • ships with Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Mighty Mouse.

The new 8-core Mac Pro, $3,299 (US):

  •  two 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5500 series processors with 8 MB of shared L3 cache;
  •  6 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 32 GB;
  •  NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics with 512 MB of GDDR3 memory;
  •  640 GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
  •  18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
  •  Mini DisplayPort and DVI (dual-link) for video output (adapters sold separately);
  •  four PCI Express 2.0 slots;
  •  five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports;
  •  Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and
  •  ships with Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Mighty Mouse.

Available from next week, the Mac Pro is now cheaper than the previous entry model by $300. Enough to tempt you?

Apple today also announced updates to its iMac and Mac mini.

  • _horse
    Cool... but still not worth the rediculous price tag. Especially in this economy.
    Reply
  • jrroman1977
    I love macs, but I ate that they always put underpowered video cards in their very expensive hardware. I guess I'll stay with my home built PC :)
    Reply
  • tayb
    I thought this would require the new tri-channel ram but Apple is only offering it in multiples of 2? Am I missing something?

    They also dropped the price of 32GB of ram $3000 from $9,100 to $6,100. Has gone from a head scratching ripoff to just a laughable ripoff.
    Reply
  • Custom built dual Xeon 5500 machine will cost less and you could even put much better video card and much faster drives for this price. And even maybe 12GB of RAM - 6 gigs for each CPU socket. Apple's pricing is just ridiculous for anybody to take care, except the die-hard Apple fanboys, of course ;]
    Reply
  • wymer100
    Even with the low-end video cards, these workstations are cheap compared to other vendors. I'm surprised they didn't offer workstation-class video cards as an option, though.
    Reply
  • ZeroTech
    Dual LGA 771 Intel 5400: ~$600
    2x Intel Xeon 5520: ~$530(ea) = ~$1060
    6 GB of 1066 MHz DDR3: ~$100
    Video Card: I guess ~$250
    Nice/productive Case: ~$100
    640 GB SerialATA: ~$70
    Double-Layer DVD Burner: ~$50
    Accessories + Peripherals: ~$270 (Just in case)

    Total: ~$2500

    I guess the difference is for the Operating System: ~$800
    Reply
  • neiroatopelcc
    2500 for a quadcore with a rebranded geforce 9500gt, 3gb slow memory and error checking in chipset, processor and ram to slow stuff down?

    No sir, that's definetly not enough to tempt me!
    Reply
  • ZeroTech
    The sum of the parts goes for no more than $2500. Add ~$200 for building it and shipping it and still ~$600 over-priced. I guess the difference is the Operating System.
    Reply
  • Hatecrime69
    So why does the mac pro have a mini Displayport? It's not like it's lacking on space..

    ..but at least it looks like they finally ditched cruddy intel integrated on the mac mini, so that's something positive at least
    Reply
  • tipoo
    You would think that a computer that starts at 2600 dollars would ship with a graphics card worth half a crap. And you cant use the "People dont buy macs for gaming" excuse anymore, with OpenCL around the corner and various image/video editing softwares using GPU's more extensively, its realy unforgiveable.
    Reply