Apple updates the Mac Pro

“With up to 12 cores, the new Mac Pro outperforms our previous top-of-the-line system by up to 50 percent, and with over a billion possible configurations, our customers can create exactly the system they want.”

The base-level Mac Pro will use the ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card with 1GB of memory, with the faster Radeon HD 5870 available as an option.

A new 512GB SSD option is available to order, and you can fit up to four of them in the machine if your budget is sufficiently astronomical.

The back panel features two Mini DisplayPorts and a dual-link DVI port, which means you can use two LED Cinema Displays without purchasing a second graphics card.

The new quad-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $2,499 (US), includes:

one 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon W3530 processor with 8MB of fully-shared L3 cache;

3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 16GB;

ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;

two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI (dual-link) port (adapters sold separately);

1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;

18x SuperDrive® with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);

four PCI Express 2.0 slots;

five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire® 800 ports;

AirPort Extreme® 802.11n;

Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and

Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse.

The new 8-core Mac Pro, with a suggested retail price of $3,499 (US), includes:

two 2.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5620 processors with 12MB of fully-shared L3 cache per processor;

6GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC SDRAM memory, expandable up to 32GB;

ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory;

two Mini DisplayPorts and one DVI (dual-link) port (adapters sold separately);

1TB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;

18x SuperDrive with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);

four PCI Express 2.0 slots;

five USB 2.0 ports and four FireWire 800 ports;

AirPort Extreme 802.11n;

Bluetooth 2.1+EDR; and

Apple Keyboard with numerical keypad and Magic Mouse.