Apple updates Mac Pro -- "the fastest Mac we've ever made"

[Shrygue]

via Engadget




It's the week before Macworld 2008, and Apple's updated the Mac Pro with Intel's new 45nm quad-core Penryn Xeon 5400 (Stoakley) CPUs at up to 3.2GHz. The new 8-core config is $2,800, and Apple's Phil Schiller is calling these machines the "fastest Mac we've ever made" (not that we'd expect the newest machine would be anything but).

Standard options:

• 2GB of 800MHz DDR2 RAM
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT (256MB)
• 320GB drive, 16x DVDRW
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, (2) PCI Express 2.0, (2) PCI Express slots
• That fancy new Apple keyboard they've been shipping with iMacs

No Blu-ray, as rumored, but it can be configured with plenty of hard drives (as usual), RAID, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics cards, and 802.11n. Why do we feel like Apple threw these up today just to screw with everyone at CES? (Actually, it's because Intel is announcing all those new chips -- we get that.)

[the_eternal_dark]

Finally the Mac gets newer hardware. Hopefully we will see some games coming to Mac to use that crazy hardware configuration. All that is needed now is sli support (or open sourcing its drivers, etc) and Mac is in the gaming business.