It’s testament to Apple’s combination of finessed software and AMD’s capable FirePro graphics cards, and it makes a legitimate difference to the experience of video editing. SunSpider, the test of browser Javascript performance, completed in 108.0ms (where faster is better). In Xbench, the Mac Pro scored 330.76 in the processor category, while in Cinebench’s CPU testing it scored a huge 1,160cb. In comparison, the top-spec 2013 iMac with a 3.5GHz quadcore Core i7 came in at 15,129. The 8-core Xeon E5 is another strong hitter, scoring an impressive 25,312 in Geekbench 3, the synthetic test of processor and memory performance.
That’s around 300 MB/s more than the MacBook delivered in each category, and an even bigger step up compared to 2013’s 27-inch iMac refresh. Apple rates the Mac Pro at up to 1.2 GB/s sequential reads and up to 1 GB/s sequential writes, and in our tests with Blackmagic’s Disk Speed tool, we saw a hugely impressive 935.3 MB/s reads and 965.3 MB/s writes.
In fact, the Mac Pro features the fastest PCIe storage Apple has used to-date, comfortably out-performing the previous champion, the late-2013 refresh of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display.
