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?