New Mac Pros (8 cores standard), Xserves

Apple has unveiled new Mac Pros, which the company claims "deliver up to twice the performance of their predecessors." Primary upgrades include the use of 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, graphics card options including the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 and up to 4TB of internal storage. The new thin aluminum Apple Keyboard also now ships with every Mac Pro. The standard configuration is priced at $2800 and includes:

• two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
• 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• 16x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
• Bluetooth 2.0 EDR

Options include: one 2.8 GHz, two 3.0 GHz, or two 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors; up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 fully-buffered ECC memory; up to four 1TB Serial ATA hard drives running at 7200 rpm or up to four 300GB SAS drives running at 15000 rpm; Mac Pro RAID card; up to two 16x SuperDrives with double-layer support; NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics cards; AirPort Extreme 802.11n

Apple also refreshed the Xserve line, bumping the standard $3000 configuration to the following specifications:

• a single 64-bit 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor with 12MB of L2 cache and a 1600 Mhz front side bus;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM, expandable up to 32GB;
• a single 80GB SATA Apple Drive Module;
• dual Gigabit Ethernet on-board;
• internal graphics;
• two FireWire 800 and three USB 2.0 ports; and
• two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots
• an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

Options include: dual 2.8 or 3.0 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors; 80GB and 1TB 7200 rpm SATA or 73GB or 300GB 15,000rpm SAS Apple Drive Modules; internal Xserve RAID card; Gigabit Ethernet, 4Gb Fibre Channel and U320 SCSI expansion card options, and a 750W redundant power supply.

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