...from: http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/macprobench/index.php? lsrc=mwweek-0814

Quad-core Xeon-based desktop easily beats G5-based predecessors By James Galbraith The standard configuration of the Mac Pro outperforms its PowerPC- based G5 predecessors by a wide margin, helping to justify Apple’s 2005 decision to switch to processors from Intel. What’s more, the system powered by two dual-core 2.66GHz Xeon chips narrowly missed becoming the first machine to ever record a Speedmark score of over 300.

Still, tallying a Speedmark 4.5 score of 299 in Macworld Lab testing is nothing to sneeze at—especially in light of the fact that a few of the tests that make up Speedmark involve applications that don’t yet run natively on Intel chips. That means the Mac Pro was able to improve upon the Speedmark score of the Power Mac G5 Quad by 14 percent, even though the collection of tests that comprises Speedmark includes several which require Apple’s Rosetta code-translation technology.

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As the results chart above shows, in addition to having our highest Speedmark score, the Mac Pro posted the best results in five of the seven individual tests we've listed here. On some tests, such as rendering a scene in Cinema 4D, applying a video effect in iMovie, or using Compressor to encode a movie into MPEG2, the Mac Pro beat out its predecessor by just a few seconds. Other tests, such as creating a Zip archive and running the Unreal Tournament 2004 Botmatch, the Mac Pro’s lead widened—10 percent faster at archiving and 47 percent more frames per second in UT2004 than the fastest Power Mac G5.

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