Nehalem Mac Pro: Memory performance, sweet spots
As the weeks have passed since Apple introduced its Nehalem powered Mac Pro, more and more reviewers and benchmarkers have stepped up to how impressed they are with the absolute brute power built into Cupertino’s full tower iron.
One of the more authoritative voices talking up the charms of Apple’s new Mac Pro is BareFeats, which has published, A Case For More Memory (BareFeats), a highly informative article that looks at whether DIMMs installed in multiples of twos or threes provides better performance (ie Nehalem should by design do better using the latter) and the relative sweet spots for different applications.
Source: BareFeats
The verdict? Well, that depends on the applications you are running and results can vary widely. For example, the After Effects CS 4 (can address at most 13GB of RAM) series displayed above shows that a Nehalem Mac Pro with 8GB is perhaps one price/performance sweet spot.
Where to find Nehalem Mac Pro memory
The new Nehalem Mac Pros are beautiful and powerful beasts, but kitting them out with memory at the Apple Store could require a second mortgage on your home. That said, here sample prices for 12GB kits from three sources known for quality and Macintosh expertise:
• 8.0GB OWC Matched Set (2GB x 4) PC-8500 1066MHz DDR3 ECC—$149, Other World Computing
— See also: OWC memory rebates
• 8GB Kit (4×2GB) 1066MHz (PC8500) ECC SDRAM—$146, Trans International
• 8GB (2GBx4), 240-pin DIMM, DDR3 PC3-8500—$198.98, CrucialSee also:
— One user’s Nehalem Mac Pro Geekbench results
— Where does Intel’s Nehalem get its juice?
Going forward, however, application developers will optimize their applications to take better advantage of more processor cores and memory. Should you buy as much as you can now? The easy answer is to wait because RAM always gets cheaper with time (well, almost always).
Nevertheless, BareFeats performance guru Rob Art Morgan convincingly sums up his argument that more memory is always better, “You never can be too thin, too rich, have too many cores, or have too much memory.”
I don’t need to see another spinning beach ball to be convinced of the wisdom of Morgan’s argument…
What’s your take?
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