We take a look inside. It's rife for upgrading on the cheap
The quality of the chassis is reminiscent of high-end SilverStone's. Detailing is excellent, and the front-mounted ports include a couple of USB2.0, single FireWire400 and 800s, and the always-present microphone socket.
The system is relatively quiet load, a testament to Apple's engineering skills.
The rear features a 120mm exhaust fan and a cornucopia of ports - including a further three USB 2.0, single FireWire400 and 800s, dual GigE networking ports, and optical input/outputs.
The Mac Pro isn't designed as a gaming system, obviously, but all graphics sub-system choices include twin dual-link DVI ports capable of driving a couple of 30in displays - preferably Apple's own, if the company gets its way.
Note, too, that you cannot throw in a regular PCIe graphics card from your PC and expect it to work - the Mac Pro-approved cards use custom BIOSes.
Access to the innards is a simple enough affair; we simply pulled the lever, in the above picture, and the side-panel came off without fuss.
The guts of the Apple Mac Pro are revealed.
The motherboard, based on an Intel 5400-series Seaburg chipset, provides a total of four PCIe expansion slots, split over two PCIe 2.0 and two PCIe 1.1.
The first two slots are both mechanical x16 - ideal for graphics cards - but the latter two are limited to x4. The motherboard possesses 40 PCIe lanes but doesn't support NVIDIA's SLI or ATI's CrossFireX under the native Mac OS X operating system.
The basic specification is good but you don't want to pay Apple's exorbitant pricing for upgrading the hard drive, system RAM, WiFi, and CPUs, right?
Read on to find out just how to do this in a few easy steps, saving you a bundle along the way....
