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Silver Tower Mac Pro (Dual Optical) Q&A - Published February 7, 2008
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What are the major differences between the "Early 2008" (Harpertown/Penryn) Mac Pro and the original Mac Pro?
Please note that all systems mentioned in this Q&A have been discontinued. The "Early 2008" Mac Pro models were replaced by the "Early 2009" Mac Pro models on March 3, 2009.
From external inspection, the "Early 2008" (Harpertown/Penryn) Mac Pro models essentially look identical to the original Mac Pro models that they replaced.
Ports are the same, for example, with dual Gigabit Ethernet, five USB 2.0 ports, two Firewire "400" ports, two Firewire "800" ports, and optical digital audio in/out, among others. However, the "Early 2008" models do have Bluetooth 2.0+EDR standard whereas this was an optional upgrade for the original models. AirPort Extreme (802.11a/b/g/n) is an optional upgrade for both lines.
Internally, however, the architecture used by the "Early 2008" models is a substantial upgrade to that used by the original series. The "Early 2008" series uses faster and more efficient Intel Xeon 5400 (Harpertown/Penryn) processors with larger level 2 caches, a more advanced vector engine, faster frontside buses (1.6 GHz instead of 1.33 GHz), faster memory (800 MHz instead of 667 MHz), support for optional faster Serial Attached SCSI drives (with the installation of a Mac Pro RAID card), and two 16-lane PCIe 2.0 slots.
For your convenience, the major technical differences between the original and "Early 2008" Mac Pro lines are summarized below:
Mac Pro |
||
Processor Speed: |
2.0 GHz-3.0 GHz |
2.8 GHz-3.2 GHz |
Processor Type: |
Xeon 5100 Series |
Xeon 5400 Series |
Processor Cores: |
Dual/Quad Core |
Quad Core |
System Bus: |
1.33 GHz |
1.6 GHz |
L2 Cache: |
4 MB-8 MB* |
12 MB-24 MB** |
Memory Speed†: |
667 MHz |
800 MHz |
Std. RAM: |
1 GB |
2 GB |
Max. RAM: |
16 GB†† |
32 GB |
Video Card: |
GeForce 7300 GT |
Radeon HD 2600 XT |
Video RAM: |
256 MB |
256 MB |
Standard HD: |
250 GB |
320 GB |
HD Interface: |
Serial ATA |
Serial ATA/SAS◊ |
SuperDrive: |
6X DL◊◊ |
8X DL◊◊ |
Bluetooth 2.0+EDR: |
Optional |
Standard |
AP Extreme: |
Optional |
Optional |
Expansion: |
4 PCIe |
2 PCIe 2.0, 2 PCIe |
* In the stock configuration of the original Mac Pro "Quad Core" 2.66, each processor has 4 MB of shared level 2 cache. The custom configuration with two 3 GHz Quad Core Xeon X5365 processors each have 8 MB of level 2 cache per processor (4 MB per pair of cores).
** For the "Early 2008" Mac Pro models, each Quad Core processor has 12 MB of level 2 cache with 6 MB of level 2 cache shared between each pair of cores.
† Both systems use ECC DDR2 FB-DIMM memory, but the maximum speed supported is different.
†† Apple officially supports a maximum of 16 GB of RAM but third-parties have been able to upgrade the system to 32 GB of RAM using eight 4 GB memory modules.
◊ Supports Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) with the addition of a Mac Pro RAID card.
◊◊ Apple promotes these systems as offering a "16X" Dual-Layer SuperDrive, but that is the speed for writing single-layer DVD-R. The drive in the original Mac Pro writes DVD+R DL discs at up to 6x speed and the drive in the "Early 2008" Mac Pro writes DVD+R DL discs at up to 8x speed.
In the US (and in many other countries), to purchase a used Mac Pro, high-quality storage or memory for the Mac Pro, visit site sponsor Other World Computing.
Please refer to the Ultimate Mac Comparison feature to dynamically compare any Mac Pro model to any other G3 or later Mac.
Also see: What are the differences between the "Early 2008" (Harpertown/Penryn) Mac Pro configurations?
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