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MillimeterTest Drive: MacBook Pro vs. Mac Pro, Part 1
Sep 10, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Mac Pro
Although I’m more technology geek than journalist, I love a good scoop just as much as they do at The Washington Post or The New York Times. Sometimes, however, you pick a subject, do your research, and dog does, in fact, bite man and Goliath beats David in an early first-round knockout. Such is the case here, where we tested a single-processor, dual-core Intel Core 2 Duo-based Apple MacBook Pro notebook against a dual-processor, dual-core Xeon-based Mac Pro workstation, and the workstation proved faster in all trials—sometimes nearly twice as fast.
That said, if you cut your teeth in the analog days, when it took a real workstation to capture and edit video, you’ll be very pleasantly surprised to see how far notebook computers have progressed since those bygone days. If you’re forced to take your editing act on the road, you might also be wondering how the editing experience changes from desktop to notebook, and when it might make sense to box up your desktop and send it on location.
This article will start by describing the two test computers, spending a bit of time on their respective components with some historical perspective on the progress made over the last few years. Then, in the next installment, I’ll detail how the two computers performed in trials performed with both Apple Final Cut Studio and Adobe Production Premium CS3, and provide some tips for editing while on the road.
MacBook Pro
Our Contestants
Our Desktop system was a Mac Pro with two 3GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors with 8GB of 667MHz DDR2 RAM, equipped with an ATI Radeon X1900 graphics card driving one 23in. Cinema display, with the preview monitor driven by the Matrox MXO. Both the Radeon and MXO monitors could produce up to 1920x1200 resolution. The system came with four 465GB Western Digital drives, one for the system drive, and three set up in RAID configuration.
The notebook computer was a MacBook Pro, driven by a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, with 4GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM. The graphics chip is an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processor with dual-link DVI support and 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM, with a 17in. display that maxed out at 1680x1050 and a 150 GB serial-ATA drive.
