Was it worth it?
Before you can say 'Oh, my, just how much do those X5482, 3.2GHz Xeons cost!', we had them in the LGA771 sockets and were busy reconstructing the system, in the exact opposite fashion to which it was deconstructed. It's important to remember to reconnect the thermal-monitoring wires, folks.
The entire process took around 40 minutes but was it worth it?
This man has 5.6GHz of Xeons under his posterior, honest.
Was it worth it?
We used the popular Xbench Mac-benchmarking utility, similar to SiSoft SANDRA, and ran it on the original specification (dual 2.8GHz Xeon E5462s, 2GiB FB-DIMM RAM), on a RAM-enhanced version (dual 2.8GHz Xeon E5462s, 10GiB RAM), and performance-compared them to the 3.2GHz powerhouses (dual 3.2GHz Xeon X5482s with 2GiB and 10GiB of RAM). Mac OS X 10.5 was used, naturally.Looking at the results-comparison site, right over here, the Apple Mac Pro scores an average, composited score of 155.82, based on results obtained from 5,976 machines (at the time of writing).
The Apple-shipped machine scores an impressive 211.86, comfortably above the average, but what we see is that adding more RAM to the systems is counter-productive, as far as Xbench is concerned.
The same is true when dual 3.2GHz Xeons are placed in the sockets. The 238.54 score is represented by the machine equipped with 2GiB of RAM, which drops down to 200.24 with 10GiB in situ.
We still reckon the boost in overall system performance with 10GiB installed is absolutely worth it, especially if dabbling with extra-large files and data-sets, as per a workstation environment.
Upgrading an Apple Mac Pro's CPU sub-system is a reasonably straightforward exercise assuming that you can get hold of a decent deal on Xeon CPUs, preferably highly-clocked 45nm models.
Let us know what you think in our forums.
