Just when I posted up about the new PC Mag review of the Mac Pro, I discovered that Anandtech also posted up their full review of the new Mac Pro here on their website. The Anandtech review is full of good stuff so make sure you get a cup of coffee since the review is several pages long. They run the system through a number of tests and upgrades. Yes.. that’s right – they chose to tinker with the Mac Pro since well – it is an Intel based system which means you should be able to upgrade certain features of the system.

So what did Anand and his pals do with the Mac Pro? Well they checked out third party memory upgrades since Apple’s memory upgrades are WAYYYYY too expensive. They also looked into Windows XP performance on the Mac Pro. More importantly, they looked into the possibilities of upgrading the CPUs. Yep.. since you can purchase off the shelf XEON processors, you could easily upgrade the box with a faster set of processors for a reasonable amount of cash.

Now the real kicker is what Anand did with a pair of Intel Clovertown processors (which are not yet available). These are XEON processors with quad cores inside. They plopped these puppies into the existing sockets and sure enough – they worked without a problem inside the Mac Pro. What this means is – you could upgrade your Mac Pro when Clovertown comes out in the fourth quarter of this year. That means your quad-core Mac Pro will turn into an eight-core Mac Pro. SWEET.

Here’s the verdict at the end of the day from Anand:

The combination of excellent OS X performance, good Windows XP performance and a more interesting CPU upgrade path than any prior Mac makes the Mac Pro particularly interesting. While many were worried that Apple’s move to Intel would make the Mac more generic, it has simply made the Mac Pro more versatile and desirable.

[Check it out - thanks to Dave for this link]

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